Author: adam

  • 10 Ways to Get the Most out of your Paid Search Affiliates

    Here is a great presentation from Duncan Jennings of eConversions at a4uExpo in the UK:

    10 Ways Paid Search – Duncan Jennings – eConversions

    View more presentations from A4uexpo .

  • What is Performance Marketing?

    Michael Mothner, the founder & CEO of Wpromote Inc. posted a well writen blog post, A Look Inside Performance Marketing – Part 1.  Michael does an excellent job of explaining the concept of performance marketing and defining some of the terms in our industry.  If you are new to performance marketing, this article should help!

    "with pay-for-performance marketing efforts, companies are able to remove risk from their advertising, and for the first time marketing budgets can directly relate to sales"

    We look forward to reading Part 2!

     

  • Swine Flu Billboards?

    Have you spotted one of these Swine Flu Billboards yet?


  • Scared of Swine Fly? Stay home!

    The news is all buzzing with swim flu fever. If you are scared of the swine flu, consider avoiding the super markets, malls, and stores by getting what you need from the comfort of your own home!

    You can find all sorts of deals and savings for everything you need at DealZam – http://www.dealzam.com

    Trust the dealzam piggy to keep you out of harms way!

  • Affiliate Marketing on Twitter – Part III

    I wanted to share a twitter conversation I had with a random stranger, to add to the question of 'Is affiliate marketing on Twitter wrong?" posed by Scott Jangro. (Part 1 and Part 2).

    hawkinsw I am looking to buy about 10 folding cots. Does anyone have a clue where to buy?

    adamviener: @hawkinsw Is this the kind of folding cot you are looking for? http://cli.gs/folding-cot

    adamviener: @hawkinsw Unless you are looking to buy the beds for a hotel, I have found the Aero Beds to be better – http://tinyurl.com/aero-bed

    hawkinsw @adamviener Thanks for the links. Those are exactly the kind of cots I am looking for. Too bad they are more expensive than I hoped. 🙂

    adamviener: @hawkinsw How much are you looking to spend per cot?

    hawkinsw: @adamviener I was hoping something under $50.

    adamviener: @hawkinsw Try this folding cot for under $50 – http://cli.gs/coleman-cot

    hawkinsw: @adamviener That is exactly what I wanted. Thanks!

    People have gone back and forth on the topic of using Twitter for affiliate marketing, honestly, I think those who are strongly against it are living in the past.  Sure there is a right way and a wrong way of using any communications medium for marketing, In my opinion, as long as you are providing a real solution to a real problem, that is good marketing.  If someone puts out a message on Twitter saying they are looking to buy something, I think that providing a link to the customer is a valued service, saves them time and has the opportunity to make you and your clients some money.  Win-Win-Win!

     

  • Reaching out to CA Politicians va Twitter

    Here is a great site where you can find the twitter addresses of some of the california state politicians, as well as other states:

    http://newthinking.bearingpoint.com/2008/11/20/govtwit-directory/

    I just sent out tweets to a bunch of them, feel free to grab their addresses or re-tweet my messages to help spread the word!

    http://www.twitter.com/adamviener

    Adam

  • California Puts Small Businesses at Risk

    In an attempt to raise tax revenues from larger online merchants and internet sales, California is threatening to put a lot of small businesses out of business.  This recently happened in New York.  The country needs to either decide to tax all internet sales, or none of them, but this piecemeal approach has caused large e-commerce companies to shut down local stores (read cut jobs) in order to avoid having a local presense in a given state, and now they are looking to cut marketing partners who happen to reside in New York or California to continue to avoid paying taxes on sales in that state.  The loop holes are harming workers and small businesses.

    Please read the following letter from Rebecca Madigan, the founder of the Performance Marketing Alliance:

    California Bill 178 threatens to change the performance marketing playing field. If you are a publisher or agency whose business is in California, your livelihood is at risk.

     

    This bill, copying a similar one in New York, unfairly categorizing publishers as sales presence for out-of-state advertisers. This means taxes will be levied on out-of-state advertisers, potentially causing them to shut down their publisher relationships in the state (it happened in New York). Learn more at www.performancemarketingalliance.com.

     

    With your help, we have a great chance to kill this bill: the PMA is working with the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers Association lobbying groups to fight this bill. These groups have successfully killed similar bills in the past, but the difference now is the precedent set by New York state. They believe the only way this bill can be killed is to have a coordinated grass-roots effort that demonstrates the devastating effect this bill will have on performance marketers in California.

     

    With the support of CalChamber and CalTax, PMA is launching a coordinated grass-roots campaign that targets congressional representatives. We are developing an attack plan that includes sample letters, fact sheets, congressional contacts by zip code, and a “Visit Sacramento” day, to put faces in front of decision makers.

     

    First step: The PMA is extremely fortunate to have the support and experience of Beth Kirsch, a well known industry leader who was formerly a federal lobbyist. She is leading our effort, but we need your help. We are looking for California performance marketers to get involved. The most seriously impacted are California publishers and OPMs.

     

    We don’t have much time – we have until March 31st to make an impact.

     

    As we learned from our colleagues in New York, the passage of this bill could have devastating effects on California performance marketers.  If this passes in California, it virtually assures a firestorm of adoption by other states, which could devastate our entire industry. If we beat this bill, it will severely limit the adoption in other states.

     

    Reply if you can help with the fight. At the very least, please forward this email to your Californian friends.

     

    Rebecca Madigan

    Founder

    Performance Marketing Alliance, Inc.

    805.469.1496

    rebecca@performancemarketingalliance.com

  • Speed PPC vs. Efficient PPC – Review & Comparison

    Building and managing good pay per click campaigns can be a tedious and time consuming task.  In today’s world of quality scores and click price penalties for poor performing campaigns, it is more important than ever to have tight adgroups with keywords, ads, and landing pages tightly focused around a single topic or phrase.  The old days of finding thousands of keywords, dumping them into one large adgroup and seeing what works is officially over.


    A number of PPC campaign management tools have sprung up to speed up the process of creating smaller adgroups and make the task easier and more efficient.  We decided to evaluate Speed PPC and Efficient PPC, put them to the test and see which one works the best.


    The basic concept behind these tools is that you take a high volume term or list of terms as your seed list, and expand your keywords by matching those terms against an expansion list of terms like City, States, etc…  This might be over simplified as both tools can be used with or without expansion lists.


    Efficient PPC Review (Version 1.1.0.3) from Web Monsters LTD.


    Efficientppc

    Efficient PPC was easy to get up and running, the documentation provides easy step by step instructions on how to utilize the software to build campaigns on Google using the Eficcient PPC software and Google’s Adwords Editor. 


    The Efficient PPC software comes with 8 expansion lists pre-installed: buy-words, capital-cities, cheap-words, colors, countries, months, us-cities, and us-states.  Additionally, through their member area, you can download the following 5 additional expansion lists: car-manufactures, car-models, domain-extensions-countries, domain-extensions-general, and toy-companies.


    I especially like Efficient PPC’s ability to mix and match up to 5 keyword phrase lists (seed or expansion lists).  Their use of insert tokens in urls and adcopy is very intuitive, and the software’s ability to set Google account settings to insure you limit your campaigns to a default 2,000 keyword Adgroups, and 50,000 keyword campaigns should come in handy.


    Efficient PPC has the ability to build campaigns for both Google and Microsoft AdCenter.  However, Microsoft AdCenter seems to have been added as an afterthought with little to no documentation or settings in the tool, other than a checkbox when building a campaign to create a CSV file for importing into AdCenter.  Efficient PPC does not currently support Yahoo Search Marketing or other PPC search engines at this time.


    Speed PPC Review (Version 3.0.11)


    Speedppc Speed PPC was equally easy to get up and running, and the documentation is a bit more detailed and may take a little longer to understand.  That is understandable, as the Speed PPC system is a little harder to understand and has a few more features.


    The Speed PPC software comes with 15 pre-installed expansion keyword lists: Action Keywords, Australia Cities, Australia Regions, Canada Cities, Canada Regions, Descriptive Keywords, Germany Cities, Germany Regions, Lead Keyword, Price Keywords, UK Cities, UK Regions, US Cities, US Cities (optimized), and US Regions. 


    Additionally, through their member area, Affiliate Pro members can download the following 19 additional main expansion lists: Australian Suburbs, Car Models, Cell Phone Models, Colors, Digital Cameras, Laptops, Motorcycle Models, Occupations, Perfumes, Routers, Top 1000 Actors, Top 1000 Books, Top 1000 Musicians, Top 300 PS2 Games, Top 300 PS3 Games, Top 300 Xbox Games, Top 300 Xbox360 Games, Top 500 Wii Games, and Video Cameras.  Plus, there are another 184 Geographic expansion lists with Cities and Regions of just about any country you can imagine!


    Speed PPC is setup into 3 different campaign building modules, Single Core, Dual Core, and Domain.  The Single Core takes a single core campaign based on a seed keyword list, The Dual Core campaign takes a seed keyword list and combines it with an expansion list, and the Domain module takes a seed list of domain names and automatically generates a list of 132 typo domain variations like wwwdomain.com and ww.domain.com.


    Speed PPC’s Affiliate Pro Membership also comes with 18 Landing Page template designs, easy instructions for passing and utilizing seed keywords and expansion keywords dynamically in your landing pages via PPC, and an affiliate database tool that enables you to import an affiliate advertiser’s data feed and dynamically pull product, pricing, and other data into your landing pages based on the keywords in the ad campaign.  These advanced features enable you to build truly optimized ad groups, ad text, and landing pages that carry the specific terms all the way to your landing pages and the actual products displayed on those pages.  Very powerful stuff!


    There are a few things I really like about Speed PPC.  First Speed PPC works with Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, and many secondary search engines.  The software has a custom output file tool that will enable you to customize the output for any search engine platform.  Second, the tool has advanced ad options enabling you to create variable ad templates based on keywords.  Finally, SpeedPPC has the ability to create unique tracking numbers so you can choose to pass a number instead of your keywords in your urls.


    Which Pay-Per-Click Campaign Building Tool should you choose?


    Both Speed PPC and Efficient PPC will effectively get the job done.  If you are primarily working with Google Adwords and dabbling with Microsoft AdCenter, Efficient PPC might be a good choice.  It’s a little easier to use and quicker to get up and running on.  If however, you are working with Yahoo, Affiliate Data feeds, or want to take advantage of some more globalization and expanded keyword lists, Speed PPC might be a better choice.


    Efficient PPC starts at $156 for a quarterly subscription and goes up to $468 for a lifetime subscription.


    Speed PPC comes in 2 versions, regular and Affiliate Pro.  The regular version is $397 and the Affiliate Pro version is $497.  Both versions come with 12 months of free upgrades.


    Both come with Money-back Guarantees, with Efficient PPC offering 60 days and Speed PPC offering 30.


    Honestly if you are spending any real time managing PPC campaigns, then either software package is going to save you more than enough of your time to cover the cost.  Time is Money, so be sure to integrate one of these great tools into your PPC campaign building process, you won’t be sorry!


    Related Links:



  • Affiliate Marketing on Twitter, oh My!

    Scott Jangro posted a few blog posts about affiliate marketing on Twitter that have created a bit of a discussion.  Here are the posts:

    The 2nd blog post talks about a test I have been trying on Twitter.  Since my comment / response to his blog post apparently was too for his comment system, I thought I would create a new blog post here in response.  Here it is:

    When looking at the Tweets listed in Scott's blog post, I would say that one is probably crossing the line and the other one maybe not.  Since I did the tweets and have been playing around with this to see if it works, here is where I think the line could have been drawn.

    Origional Message:

    @DesignLady Dear Lisa, In that family of 3 how many boys and girls. I bet the girls are pretty like you.lol I am looking to buy a laptop.

    My Reply:

    Skeeter, What kind of laptop are you looking for? I got My wife got a PowerBook & She Loves it! http://cli.gs/macbookpro – @SkeeterHansen

    Replying to this one where the origional tweet was was cleary @DesignLady might have corssed the line, but it was not an automated response, was thought out and provided a real possible solution to her "I am looking to buy a laptop" statement.

    The other two that I responded to actually asked a general question looking for an answer to their followers and the twitter universe at large.  They asked a question, and honestly I think I gave them an honest answer that solved their question.  I think that is good marketing. Here are the other two examples:

    Origional Message:

    What company makes quality Aviator Sunglasses?  I am looking to purcahse a quality pair of Aviators.

    My Reply:

    Try Oakley http://cli.gs/oakley for those Quality SunGlasses you asked about! They are offering Free Shipping Too! @askinstructable

    Origional Message:

    I am looking to buy a Union Jack shirt. I found one for @20 and a lot os stickers. Oh and 5/17 tv on the radio @ house of blues. Sweet.

    My Reply:

    Magen, I am sure can find that Union Jack Shirt plus lots of other Union Jack Products at CafePress – http://cli.gs/cafepress – @magenprice

    Good affiliates, in my opinion, test out the new technologies to see what works and what doesn't work.  I have made a test here, and here are some of the results so far:

    Since Cli.gs gives you analytics, here are the links used an number of clicks today:

    http://cli.gs/macbookpro – 15 Hits (10 Humans and 5 Bots)
    http://cli.gs/cafepress – 13 Hits (10 Humans and 3 Bots)
    http://cli.gs/oakley - 17 Hits (14 Humans and 3 Bots)

    I am not sure about sales yet, but I tagged an sid of twitter on the links and will check that later.

    Also on Twitter I have played around with @dealzam which is a twitter account that sends tweets out as new deals are posted to www.dealzam.com, and @dealtwit that is a combined feed of dealzam deals, some goldencan coupon feeds, CJ's deal feed, and deals from other affiliates's coupon sites that have RSS feeds.

    Another program I have looked at recently is TwitterHawk, exactly the kind of bot that Scott talks about in this post, that will automate responses based on what people tweet about.  It limits responses to every 6 hours.  It's too early to tell if that will work or not.  It will take some tweaking to make sure the keywords are specific enough to generate good responses.

    The final twitter stuff I have been playing with are two websites http://www.afftwitlist.com - a listing of affiliate marketers on Twitter and http://www.politicaltwits.com – a site where you can follow what the politicians and pundits are saying on twitter.

    So there it is, those are the things I am currently playing around with on twitter.  Not sure if that qualifies me as the DB of the day, as Sam Harrelson tweeted.

  • Linkshare Fires Overstock.com

    Here is the origional Linkshare post from the linkshare blog, it doesn't seem to appear there any longer.  I pulled this from the rss feed:

    LinkShare Resigns Overstock.com

    from LinkShare Blog by LinkShare

    For the past seven years, LinkShare and Overstock.com have enjoyed a productive and mutually-beneficial partnership.

    However, we have been working together for some time to resolve a few mutual differences.  In recent weeks, it has become clear to all involved that we cannot overcome them.  As a result, LinkShare has resigned as Overstock.com’s affiliate network provider.  Of course, we will work to ensure a smooth transition for our publishers.

    As a pioneer in the performance marketing industry, LinkShare takes great pride in the breadth of our publisher network and the longevity of our retailer relationships.  We’ve served some of the biggest brands in retail for nearly a decade:

    • Avon (member since 1997)
    • Omaha Steaks (member since 1997)
    • 1800Flowers (member since 1998)
    • JC Penney (member since 1999)

    We also continue to attract today’s hottest brands, like Neiman Marcus, which brought not only its flagship store, but also Juicy Couture, Michael Kors, and Bergdorf Goodman.  Over the past year alone, Internet Retailer 500 brands that selected the LinkShare network over all others include:  eBags, Napster, Vans, Sam Ash, Chico’s and Dollar Rent-a-Car.

    Our network is strong, and our commitment to building lasting relationships across the LinkShare community remains firm.

    Kelli Beougher, Senior Vice President