Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for April 2010

Nominations Open for LinkShare Golden Link Awards

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Nominations are now open for the 8th Annual LinkShare Golden Link Awards, which will be held during the LinkShare Symposium East luncheon in New York City on June 22, 2010.

The Golden Link Awards ceremony brings together more than 400 advertisers, affiliates, OPMs and agencies, and it’s always a top notch event.

LinKShare Golden Links Awards

Last year, Joan Rivers was the host of the awards – the LinkShare Symposium East agenda doesn’t have the host listed, yet, for this year.

Nominations close at 5pm EST on Thursday, May 6, 2010. Submit your nominations for any of the twelve awards categories.

Google AdWords to an Email Opt-in vs. a Sales Page

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Q: I am just learning about Internet marketing and affiliate marketing. I’m listening to your interview with Joel Comm from his Adsense Premiere program I recently purchased. I understand the value if capturing a person’s name and email in order to market to them later. But as an affiliate marketer, I am having a difficult time picturing a scenario in which I am using Google AdWords and someone clicks on my ad which sends them to my squeeze page, so I can capture their info. I require a double opt-in, so I send them an email which they then have to click on to go to yet another sales page at the actual vendor’s site. Aren’t they going to get frustrated? Is this how you suggest doing it, or should I as an affiliate makreter just send them right to the sales page from my ad? My idea is to create a good content rich site over time. But in the short term, my goal is to make some extra money using Google Adwords to pay for my marketing efforts for my real estate business.

Shawn CollinsA: I would not recommend trying to get email leads via Google AdWords.

Instead, I would suggest driving this traffic from AdWords to a sales page, and then have a script triggering an exit pop-up for people that don’t buy the product or service on the sales page.

That way, you can attempt to directly monetize this traffic, and then have email opt-ins as your plan B as they leave your site.

You don’t want to cannibalize people who are ready to spend with you, but once you’ve lost them, you may as well go for the email.

Also, I’d suggest going with AWeber for your double opt-in gathering. They provide a great suite of tools, including the ability to A/B test.

It’s vital to test the performance of your various approaches, and if you’re not currently doing it, start now.

Will the iPad be Good for Kindle Sales?

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The iPad sold a reported 300,000 units in the first day it was available, and the numbers continue to roll in.

I’ve read the pros from Mac fanbots and cons from others, and I still don’t see the iPad as a mass market item.

But I am thinking it could be a good time to double-down on promoting the Kindle.

One of the big reasons I’ve seen for getting an iPad is to use it as an ebook reader. But the iPad doesn’t have the portability of the Kindle, even across Mac products.

It’s certainly a plus to me that I can access my Kindle purchases on my iPod Touch, computers, and Blackberry… and I do.

Plus, Amazon is pushing the Kindle hard from the homepage and touting it as their #1 bestseller.

Forget the iFad hype – push the Kindles and make some indirect money over the noise about the iPad.

Downtime Alerts for Affiliate Networks

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There is a new affiliate network monitoring service from Nickycakes.com called Network Uptime that sends alerts when an affiliate or CPA network goes down and back up.

For as long as I can remember, affiliates have been tormented by downtimes and their impact on earnings, so this is a useful service for the affiliate monitoring their campaigns.

Most of the downtimes seem to be a matter of minutes, but there have been some extensive outages tracked. A cool thing about the Network Uptime alerts is that you can see if a particular network is routinely going down.

In order to receive the alerts, follow @networkuptime on Twitter. The alerts will also go out to Cakes Chat on IRC.

More details at http://www.nickycakes.com/affiliate-network-downtime-alerts/.

Recovering from a Google Slap

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Q: I have a website that got slapped by Google and I cannot get traffic via AdWords. What do you suggest?

Shawn CollinsA: My first bit of advice is to not do what you were doing to get slapped. I know a lot of people like to play the victim and they just can’t imagine why they possibly got slapped by Google, but I’ve been using AdWords since it started and I’ve never had any issues.

Sure, they can have false negatives here and there, but I’m presuming that there is a reason when this sort of thing happens.

Anyhow, while Google is the big player in search engines, it’s not the only one. See what you can do with Yahoo (this was answered before Yahoo announced they were closing at the end of April 2010), Microsoft adCenter, etc.

Also, see what you can do in Facebook, either by driving campaigns to fan pages internally or to external sites.

Moving forward, read the terms and be sure you abide by them.