Affiliate marketing and other stuff from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.
We will have an Affiliate Summit booth (#919) at ad:tech NYC on November 3-4, 2008 and we’d love to see you there.
Stop by to say hi, ask questions, get discounts to Affiliate Summit, a chance to get a free pass, and another special, secret opportunity.
We will also have copies of the first three issues of FeedFront magazine for anybody that would like to grab them.
Network Solutions is running an online conference on October, 29, 2008 from 1 p.m. until approximately 3:30 p.m. EST called the “Solutions Stars Video Conference.”
It is going to be a series of videos and live discussions featuring 32 of the world’s leading business and marketing experts.
The live video conference will coach small business owners and entrepreneurs on how the Internet can benefit their business.
Nine content areas featuring vignettes of the Solutions Stars will run during the conference:
Attendees will be able to watch individual videos based on their content area preference or view the entire conference.
While the videos are streaming, viewers will be able to chat online with the Network Solutions team (Social Media Swami Shashi Bellamkonda and Now Is Gone Author Geoff Livingston), or participate in a live public chat.
Use this hashtag in Twitter to follow the Solutions Stars Video Conference discussion: #solutionsstars
No registration necessary – just go to http://www.solutionsstarsvideo.com/ to attend.
Online ad prices have been declining throughout 2008 and small sites are among the most affected by the faltering economy, according to MarketingVOX.
The AdIndex, a quarterly measure of online ad network pricing, shows that publishers of all sizes are feeling the pinch of a nationwide economic slowdown.
Small sites continue to command better pricing for eCPMs – now at $0.61 on average for Q3 – but these price levels have declined quarter-to-quarter. eCPMs for large sites held steady in Q3, but at a lower pricing base of $0.18.
As Yogi Berra once said, “It’s deja vu all over again”. Just like in the recession 2000, I expect we’ll see a surge in new affiliates with the CPM rates shrinking.
Two of my favorite companies are Rackspace (hosting) and Jungle Disk (online backup) are getting together with an announcement that Rackspace is acquiring Jungle Disk.
What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Well, nothing. But I would recommend that any affiliate marketer check out both services.
I’ve had a managed server on Rackspace for years, and the customer service from them is unparalleled, or as they say, fanatical.
If you rely on cPanel, Rackspace is not for you (no cPanel, but you can use Plesk with them), but otherwise, I love everything else about them.
Similarly, I am hyper-concerned about having backups of my files, and I have a couple of local backups, but also have been using Jungle Disk for a while for an automatic backup that runs overnight to backup my stuff online.
I literally sleep easier at night knowing that I have Rackspace and Jungle Disk supporting my business, and that’s saying something, because I’ve had catastrophic data loss in the past, due to being hacked, as well as dopey mistakes.
Anyhow, congrats to Rackspace and Jungle Disk – nice to see.
OpenX is expanding the beta program for the hosted version (Web based) of their OpenX ad server.
I’ve been using OpenX Hosted since the beta began, and I love it. The interface is the same as the version of OpenX that many affiliates have installed on their servers.
The convenience of never having to deal with upgrades is big to me.
The folks at OpenX also have a new opportunity rolling out called OpenX Market, which will enable affiliates to put their ad inventory out there for bidding by advertisers.
Sign up at http://www.openx.org/hosted.
Q: I am very interested in affiliate marketing and I am registered for Affiliate Summit West 2009. What would you recommend I read and what Web sites should I visit and review between now and then to become more informed about affiliate marketing, so I not overwhelmed by unfamiliar topics at the conference?
A: As far as the forums I go to on a regular basis, I go to Wicked Fire, ABestWeb, and 5 Star Affiliate Programs.
I also read a ton of affiliate marketing blogs. I would suggest going into Google Alerts and setting up a bunch of alerts from blogs based on relevant keywords like affiliate marketing and affiliate program.
That way, you will get an email each time there is a new blog post related to affiliate marketing. This could become overwhelming, so you might want to select the option to just get one email a day per term, which would have a list of all of the blog posts for that day.
As you track blogs like this, you can determine which are the most useful to you, and subscribe to those RSS feeds.
Also, if you’re not currently on Twitter, register for an account there, and then start following people who are into affiliate marketing.
After creating your account, go to Twitter Search and run queries for terms like affiliate and affiliate marketing. Then, you can see who is posting about those issues and follow them on Twitter.
And then there is FeedFront Magazine, the official magazine of Affiliate Summit. Subscriptions to the magazine are free. It comes out 4 times a year and the articles are written by the people who are working in the industry – affiliates, merchants, and network folks.
Additionally, the agenda is up for Affiliate Summit West 2009, so you can see what will be covered in the sessions.
You can see sessions on video from past Affiliate Summits on the Affiliate Summit YouTube channel for free.
Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants, a book I wrote nearly a decade ago on managing an affiliate program, is now available on the Kindle, Amazon’s wireless reading device.
I’d like to give the disclaimer that parts of the book are painfully outdated – some companies cited in the book went out of business from the time I finished the manuscript to the day the book hit stores.
But many of the premises in the book are still totally sound.
Last year, I created short videos to update each of the chapters, and you can see those affiliate manager videos for free.
They come to a total of an hour or two for 14 videos, so you can get a quick primer on the keys to setting up and running an affiliate program with them.
The Leveraging Social Networks session at Affiliate Summit Social Media 2008 featured Sachin Agarwal, President & CEO of Dawdle.com; Adam Alter, Head of Network Management at Epic Advertising; and Zac Johnson, President / CEO of MoneyReign Inc.
Emcee Jim Kukral moderated the panel.
Session description: Social networks offer great potential for affiliate marketers to grow business. Learn some of the latest techniques and strategies.
Watch the video from the Leveraging Social Networks session at http://blip.tv/file/1345571 and see other Affiliate Summit videos at http://www.affiliatesummit.tv.
I got together with Joshua Simmons of AffiliateTips.com (not my site – they have an “s” on the end) to chat about my beginnings in affiliate marketing.
We also discussed my first affiliate project, proudest achievement, how Affiliate Summit got started, and tips for affiliates.
Plus, advice for affiliates and a look to the future.
Read the interview at affiliatetips.com/interview-with-affiliatesummit-shawn-collins.html.
I went to Amazon last night to purchase a book I’d heard about on Diggnation (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions), and I saw a neat thing at the top of the screen – the Amazon Site Stripe.
This is a navigation bar for Amazon affiliates to easily create links from pages on Amazon, check stats, go to the affiliate discussion boards, and more.
If you click Settings > Options, you can turn off the Site Stripe and select which buttons are displayed.
I love this new feature, because I would have to open two browsers in the past to create Amazon affiliate links: one for the direct link to a given product and the other for the affiliate interface to create a link.
The Site Stripe only seems to show up if you’re logged in to your Amazon account already. At least, that was my experience when taking a look in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
