Make Money Online

Affiliate networks have all be jumping on the Pay-Per-Call bandwagon using RingRevenue’s pay-per-call tracking platform.  Currently I have seen programs for Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare and ShareASale.

What are the advantages of pay-per-call?

1. The ability for companies to compensate partners for sales calls.
2. The ability for consultative or high ticket purchase companies to get into performance marketing
3. The ability for websites to compensate partners for both online sales and sales that turn into calls from the website (typically lost to performance partners and a primary reason performance partners as to have phone numbers removed from landing pages).

These all sound great, but like any other new technology the devil is in the details and the implementation.  Here are some of the struggles I have run into so far:

1. Phone# Replacement Code Implementation – The vast majority of the companies offering pay-per-call have not implemented the code to actually replace the performance partner’s unique number into their landing page.  This seems like an obvious 1st step to implementation, but alas having your number show on the page is currently more of an exception than a norm.
2. Listed Call Times – Since we are dealing with phone calls, and not all companies can afford to staff their call centers 24/7, each program lists the call times for which they are willing to pay for calls.  That makes perfect sense, but for one of the companies I was testing, I placed a test call during listed hours, and got a message that the company was taking a day off to go sailing!  If you are not going to be around, you need to communicate this to your partners so they aren’t wasting their money on campaigns.
3. Call Leakage – Performance marketers have talked about website leakage for a long time, leakage is paths that consumers can take that end up being uncompensated for the performance partner.  In fact pay-per-call promises to solve the phone number leakage problem.  One company I placed a test call to directed customers to visit their website (a non-compensated url) and then proceeded to place the customer on hold and then every 10 seconds on hold offered the customer the option to enter a call back number and not lose their place in line.  While that might be very convenient for a customer, it encourages the customer to drop off the call before hitting the pay-out time threshold.
4. Ghost Calls – If you are focusing your marketing efforts on mobile marketing, you may find that there are a lot of “Ghost Calls”, calls that appear as clicks/calls to the marketing network you are working with but never actually generate a call.  This can happen if a customer clicks on the “call” option and then doesn’t click ok when their phone asks them if they want to place the call.   This seems to happen a lot in the mobile display advertising space.
5. Standard Landing Pages – While having the standard landing pages and replacing the phone number is a great first step, it would be great to also offer mobile marketing links with mobile landing pages that are made to look good on the various types of mobile phones.

My suggestion is that this is a very new technology with a lot of hurdles.  It’s worth testing the waters right now, but tread lightly and make sure to test out the customer experience on the click and the call before proceeding.

Read the rest here:
Pay-Per-Call Programs from the Trenches

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Coupons offer both advertisers and publishers clear benefits. While coupons let advertiser better measure the performance of their promotions, publishers have the opportunity to receive commissions on every redemption, and increase conversions by virtue of the coupon being an incentive.

Not surprising, then, that mobile coupons are starting to go mainstream. And the driving force behind this trend is smartphones. And as smartphones approach critical mass, we may finally see the rise of LBS (location-based-service) marketing.

Mobile Coupon Families

A recent study (commissioned by Placecast) reveals that the user profile of those who download mobile coupons has shifted. Whereas just last year, the majority of mobile coupon users were young males, mobile coupons are now being downloaded primarily by the same demographic that’s traditionally known for clipping them offline. As Ad Age reports:

A study conducted by Harris Interactive found adults with children at home are more likely to be interested in text alerts about sales and promotions than those with no kids at home. Of people with kids younger than 6 in their household, 35% are at least somewhat interested in getting opt-in text alerts from favorite businesses, compared to 32% of households with older kids and 25% of homes with no children.

[And] the balance has tilted away from men, as adoption of smartphones such as the iPhone and various Android devices has become more popular.

So as smartphones approach critical mass, they’re pulling mobile coupons along with them. But the questions remains: what larger implication could this have for mobile marketing?

Well, the answer might be that LBS advertising might not be far behind. And it might even be mobile coupons that ushers LBS into the mainstream.

LBS Advertising: Today and Tomorrow

Simply put, LBS is using a user’s geo-location to provide any kind of service (from driving directions to restaurant recommendations to advertising). The marketing opportunity is clear: LBS could easily be used to drive foot-traffic through geo-targeted ads.

But as much we’ve always been able to pin-point triangulate the location of a mobile phone user, LBS has never really taken off. Well, smartphones may change that. After all, so many of the popular apps we already use, like Foursquare, are location-driven.

Location-based-services is one of those digital trends that have been full of potential for years and years and years. But as one year fades into the next, observers keep wondering  when, and if, it’ll explode into the mainstream.

Consider this: as much as LBS apps are widely available, LBS ad technology remains in its nascent stages. However, if mobile coupon advertisers are already experiencing such positive results, why wouldn’t they begin to explore the possibilities of LBS coupons?

Essentially, LBS coupons could prove to be the incentive to develop new LBS  based ad platforms or refine existing ad networks to take advantage of LBS’s potential. The top four affiliate networks (Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, and ShareASale) are in prime position to take advantage of such a trend since running coupon campaigns is already the bread and butter of the affiliate industry. Whether through new development or refinement of existing platforms, profits from such efforts will underwrite the expansion of LBS marketing, thus making it more affordable/accessible to a wider range of advertisers.

As smartphones become the rule rather than the exception, however, we might finally see LBS join the standard arsenal of tools marketers employ. Smartphones have already demonstrated a clear and present marketing opportunity. So it may just be a matter of time before they make LBS marketing a mainstay of digital marketing.

Credit:
Smartphones Pushing Mobile Coupons into Mainstream

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This is another virtually pointless post, yes. I’ve promised posts and more frequent posting and just haven’t lived up to it.

I’m just making this post to say: I still have plans on blogging more in the future. I’ve learned A LOT of information that I can definitely share. Right now I’m just too busy to really think about anything else but my main projects. A project 5 months into the making is going to launch in the near future (for real this time) so it’s like cramming for finals week in my head right now.

Once things cool down I’ll be able to relax and get to blogging more. Priorities folks…gotta win the bread.

This post will be totally useless without some usable piece of affiliate marketing information so here it goes: something I’ve been experimenting with in a few small affiliate side projects is collecting email address information and THEN shooting them to the affiliate offer (”You’re getting a free [blah blah], just enter your name and e-mail address to continue!”). It seems there are quite a few people out there doing this. E-mail them with some “Welcome” packet of affiliate offers, sub them to your list and just mail out more affiliate offers. Plus make commissions off whatever offer you send them to after you capture the name/email. There’s almost always higher payouts for email only offers too. Something to think about and test.

Sorry for being lame.

Read more here:
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By this time most online marketers understand that good landing pages are a key driver of business. I had the pleasure of speaking with Anne Holland, founder of MarketingSherpa, who is up to her old tricks, teaching us how to be better marketers with her awesome quiz site WhichTestWon.

Wondering whether testing landing pages is worthwhile? Well the math is quite simple: as a marketer you buy 100 clicks.   If you convert two people to customers and make $100 from each customer you’ve just made $200.  Now, if you do some testing and increase your landing page conversion by 100 percent and get  four customers from the same 100 clicks, you’ve just doubled your revenue. Every week there is a new A/B test on landing pages where you get to guess the winner and then see what the true results of the test were online.

Anne (pictured below) shared some best practices with me, then we talked about the future of landing page testing and online marketing.

WhichTestWon is about a year old now. Why did you decide to launch it and in this format?

I’ve always loved A/B and multivariate testing because it’s the easiest way to get big results and improvement for your landing pages, your lead generation forms, your eCommerce carts – as well as your email campaigns – without spending lots of money and without having to drive more traffic. It freaked me out when I discovered 73 percent of marketers aren’t doing any testing whatsoever these days. A friend of mine says that’s like driving with your eyes closed.

So, one day after I’d retired from MarketingSherpa, it just hit me — why not a fun site to show A/B testing? Sort of like Hot or Not, only what you see are two different creatives, and then you vote on which one in reality did better. Then, we show you the real results data and you learn how far off you were.

What are the three or four best practices that you can recommend to people?

Use bigger, more prominent buttons.

Test your headline copy and your button copy. Test stripping off the navigation bar, extra columns, and all extraneous content from your key conversion pages.

It’s pretty simple really.  And when your IT team tells you the site’s “already been tested”, you have to educate them that usability testing has NOTHING to do with A/B testing. Usability testing is great, but it doesn’t tell you how to stop people from abandoning your site, your registration forms or your cart. Usability testing doesn’t help you learn how to convince people to convert.

What is most overlooked  in landing page testing?

Aside from the fact that it’s not done?!

Obvious stuff like match your headline to the headline of the ad or offer that drove the traffic, make your buttons bigger, get rid of extraneous navigation, etc.

I also think mainstream marketers have overlooked the possibility of overlays; they look like a pop-up but are not blocked by pop-up blockers. It’s a great way to garner email opt-ins, among other things. Make them look classy and they can work for your brand. And probably not enough people have tested added video, let alone all the related permutations like sound off, sound on, auto-play, etc.

What are the most common mistakes?

Tracking only to the click on the page tested. We see a lot of test data showing when the marketer tracked beyond the initial click the true winner of the test was revealed. What you want to encourage are qualified clicks. You can test to improve your qualified click rate, but you have to be able to track further down the funnel. It’s not impossible; you can even do it with Google Web Optimizer which is free technology.

The second biggest mistake is testing a really badly performing page. It’s a lot harder to get conclusive results if you have little conversion data to base the math on. Test a page that already has conversions, so if you raise them by say 20 percent, you’re going to look like a hero to the CEO. That’s what you want.

What are your favorite tests from the past year and why?

The ones where I got the answer wrong; probably a dozen of them I guessed totally wrong.. The point is no matter how big an expert you are, you’re going to guess wrong sometimes because you’re not a true representative of who the marketplace, the page or email was designed for. Your ideas don’t matter. What matters is the marketplace. They are the ones you’re trying to convert. You have to test. Period.

Here are some of my favorites.

#1 Which PPC Landing Page Increased Telephone Inquiries by 42 percent?
The thing I liked about this was that the marketers didn’t just measure clicks. They know that prospects who can be convinced to pick up the phone are much more likely to convert to buying their service. This is true of many pricier B2C offers. So the whole test was geared toward getting more qualified phone calls. Too many marketers forget to measure phones as one of the response media. Each of your test panels needs a different phone number!

#2 Online Video Voiceover A/B Test: Which Accent Convinced More
Global Visitors to Click for a Free Download? (Brit vs. Yank) The results of this test were really fun because the marketers measured conversion rates by country. It turned out people in Australia, for example, preferred a completely different voice-over accent than people in India did. It was also different for the US vs. UK. If the marketers had picked one single “winner” for the entire world some countries would have significantly depressed responses! This test proves that different demographics can and will respond very differently to the exact same creative. You have to test and measure separately by key demographics.

#3 Profile-Pimp.net Tests Giant Button & Landing Page Designs. Which Version Increased Clickthroughs?
I love this test so much I actually invented an award category just for it in last year’s Testing Awards at our site. In this test, the marketers took a very nice fat button and expanded it to be the biggest button possibly in history. It was a button that had wandered too near the nuclear power plant, if you know what I mean. You can see the creatives and the results are eye-opening.

What tests surprised you most and which were counter intuitive?

I’m a former copywriter, so I think I “know copy”, but the wording tests are often nearly impossible to guess at. There was one where a colon versus a dash was used in the subject line of an email, which really made a difference in responses, and I totally guessed wrong. Who knew such a tiny factor would make a difference?

Also, sometimes images can throw me. A happy smiling human: will that help or depress responses? It completely depends on the market and the product.

Lastly, I really hate the idea of auto-play video; you know the ones that start blaring at you when you enter a site or landing page. I think it’s dreadful. But by golly, they can really work for some marketers.

How should we be thinking about the pre-click and post-click experience for the user and optimizing for conversion?

Start measuring further down the conversion path than the immediate click. The marketers who are able to measure farther get amazing data. An  A/B test on one page can send reverberations through the rest of the conversion path! Relevancy. We’ve heard that word so many times in speeches and articles it’s not really sinking in any more. I think if you come to WhichTestWon.com and look at a few of the 65+ tests we have in the library, you’ll start to get it.

Let’s talk about cutting edge practices. What are the future of landing pages?

What surprises me the most when I talk to marketers about landing page testing is they seem to think theirs is a one size fits winner for landing pages. As we well know, not all traffic is equal and behaves differently. Should we be segmenting our landing page testing? If so, how should we be thinking about it? And is there technology out there to help us?

Marketers who want to use a single landing page for everything are a perennial problem as are marketers who want to use their homepage as their PPC landing page or who send traffic for a specific keyword to a general “category” page. I think these marketers know better, but are hamstrung by budgets and politics.

The CMOs of this world have some work to do on this front. They need to cut down the jungle of problems around getting new landing pages created. They need to enable their teams to build and launch landing pages on the fly… and to test them! This is a problem of internal company politics, nothing more. Cheap and easy technology has been here for more than a decade.

How does it compare to the segmentation done in search and other marketing channels?

In every channel, from search to email, audience segmentation is the golden arrow which can make a tremendous difference in conversions. To pick segments, I always say look at the current customer base. How do they segment out? Any segment that’s more than 10% of sales is probably worthy of its own campaigns, offers,  and landing pages  tested to appeal to that segment. This is true for B2B and B2C.

Plus, of course, there are the always popular recency and relevancy segments. What you mail your customers vs. hot prospects vs. not-so-hot prospects, etc. That’s all classic direct marketing stuff.

That’s stuff catalogers were doing in the 1980s and it still applies. The tactics are still powerful. It’s just that a lot of online marketers didn’t grow up in that world so they don’t know this type of marketing science already exists.

Finally, do we need to get the point where landing pages are dynamically generated based on the user for the best converting experience by channel, time of day, key words etc?

Depends on how famous and trusted your brand is, how much traffic you’re driving, etc. There’s no general answer to this. Remember, you need a certain level of conversions per month just to run a conclusive test.

We have algorithms powering so much of our online marketing that at this point very little dynamic content is on landing pages. Do you think this is the future of landing page testing? Does landing page test technology need to catch up with other online marketing technology?

I know some fairly dinky B2B marketers, folks with small budgets and an entire marketing department of just two people, who have been doing dynamic landing pages with headlines that change based on PPC keyword for five years. This isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t have to be enormously expensive. Again, I think the hold-up is office politics more than anything else.

That’s why I wrote a white paper (pdf) all about how to overcome office politics and get your testing ideas and budget approved by the CEO, the IT department, etc. It’s posted on our site under ‘Free PDFs’.

See the original post here:
MarketingSherpa Founder Anne Holland Talks Landing Pages and WhichTestWon.com

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If you were to step into a time machine and travel back to 2006, the coolest role in the online marketing industry might have been to own an affiliate network. Fast forward to 2011 and it doesn’t seem as cool a prospect.

In the past year, affiliate networks, especially those focused on CPA (cost-per-action) offers have been facing increasingly tougher times brought on by a variety of factors including simply a glut of networks. To offset industry challenges larger networks are moving towards consolidation as a means of survival. Recent developments include:

• MediaTrust’s acquisition of Bardon Advisors
• Adknowledge’s acquisition of Hydra

CPA Boom and Bust

At one time there was estimated to be about 300 active CPA networks in the industry. With the actual tracking technology becoming commoditized setting up a network involved licensing DirectTrack or another affiliate network platform and brokering offers from a larger network.

In the land grab for affiliates, after all publishers are the lifeblood of any network, some networks got a little aggressive and offered 5 percent overriding commissions for affiliates who referred other affiliates. Referral commissions above 5 percent were not unheard of, especially for branded and big-name affiliate bloggers who might be able to refer their friends, followers and wannabe affiliates by the hundreds. Often these recruitment campaigns resulted in networks being overwhelmed by affiliate applications, accompanied by whining threads on popular affiliate forums containing accusations that the network was “sleeping on the job” or unresponsive.

In the rush to build up their affiliate base, some networks were willing to work on razor-thin margins in order to fill their affiliate ranks.

Hit on the Other Side

Another problem emerged when networks dealt with affiliates who were using paid forms of traffic promotion, such as pay-per-click, pay-per-view and media buy traffic. Because they’d often be incurring traffic costs upfront (or with a month’s buffer if you used a credit card), they’d inevitably run into cash flow issues.

In the hopes that this would alleviate situations where affiliates paused campaigns mid-month because the advertiser paid on a 30-day or longer basis, networks attempted to help their affiliates out by floating cash advances, paying balances on commissions accrued before they received payment from the advertiser. This inevitably only encouraged fraudulent practices up to and including credit card fraud by those looking to cheat to make a quick buck.

The ecosystem balanced precariously with the affiliate dependent on the network, and networks dependent on being able to get timely payment from the advertiser. Just one faulty element in the system, whether a fraudulent affiliate, a poorly-organized network or an advertiser which brutally scrubbed and sometimes shaved leads, could bring the whole system down like a house of cards.

The euphoria of getting affiliates to perform caused some affiliate managers (and possibly affiliate network owners) to place revenue growth above common sense and sustainability. In the boom time of 2005-2009 (before the FTC stepped in), it was not uncommon to hear of affiliate managers actively encourage their affiliates to promote using flogs (fake blogs) and farticles (fake articles) where deceptive content was created to entice visitors to sign up for an Acai weight loss offer or to sign up for a “Google bizop”.

Just like in the movie Wall Street, greed played the biggest role in contributing to the industry’s collapse in 2009, especially as credit card processors pulled their support for re-bills/continuity billing arrangement that some of the more predatory offers had relied on in the wake of Congressional pressure.

Being overly aggressively in offering referral commissions for recruiting affiliates to a network has come back to haunt the networks. From the generous 5 percent referral commission, the typical referral is in the range of 1-2 percent. Some networks have discontinued referrals altogether.

A number of smaller networks have either closed or collapsed due to generous cash floats where they paid out commissions to affiliates and for which they did not receive payment from advertisers.

What the Future Holds for CPA Networks

While affiliate management platforms like HasOffers have made it easier to start a network, making it profitable and creating a business model that operates in an ethical and sustainable manner is proving to be more than a can of worms for aspiring network owners.

We’re likely to see more “consolidation”, a nice term when a bigger (usually publicly-listed) business buys out a CPA asset walking on its last legs, in the industry. The smaller networks will either go for a firesale price or implode if their liabilities, especially from generous advance commissions paid out on a weekly basis, are stretched beyond the breaking point against the monthly payouts they receive from their advertiser clients.

What is a good number of networks within the CPA industry? Since we’re talking about primarily the online channel (mobile marketing and pay-per-call-based business models haven’t made major inroads into CPA marketing yet), it’ll be a fraction of what you’d see in the online/offline Fortune 500 business world. My guess is that 5 major CPA networks would be a comfortable number and with 10 networks everyone will be barely chugging along. There could be a second tier ecosystem of small networks which primarily broker or syndicate offers from the large networks and anyway from 50 to 100 small CPA networks might be a sustainable number.

View original post here:
CPA Network Consolidation: Where Does CPA Marketing Go From Here?

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Read it here.

Did an interview with my good buddy Volk, it’s kind of an update of what’s been going on with my business.

I feel like everyone coming to this blog from Volk’s is looking for something good to read, so I promise I’ll write something tasty up this week for you guys to check out.

Happy Friday.

See the original post here:
Check Out My Interview w/ Volk

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*Spoiler alert*

So after six seasons, LOST finally concluded last night. I started watching the show three weeks before this season, I got through all of the prior five seasons in that time. Once I started watching, it seemed to get more and more confusing but I just wanted to see how the show was going to end. I wanted all the questions that had been building up to be answered. What was I left with? …Nothing.

When I first started watching, I thought it was going to be just a shipwrecked trapped on a deserted island show…cool idea. Then they bring in polar bears, Dharma, time travel, and all sorts of crazy sci-fi elements…I was loving that. In the end, they explain none of it. At the start of Season 6 they create this “side flash” storyline. The whole season everybody is wondering what that even means, but I think all of our heads were still more curious about the island. What was the black smoke? What’s really special about the island? We’re told this last season would “reveal all”, but it seemed to just keep stringing along this side flash plot-line. This all builds up to the final episode where all they do is close out the weird side flash storyline they created. How do they close it out? Oh, they’re just all dead no big deal. WHAT??!?!?!

I’m sitting there wondering :

• What is the purpose of that black smoke?
• How did EVERYONE else die? It’s not just Jack in that church, it’s everyone who appeared to escape on the plane too.
• How did man in black turn into the smoke monster instantly after being thrown into that well, and why?
• What were all the weird symbols and markings?
• Island moving? Time travel? Yeah none of that explained.
• Dharma Initiative? They started going into that hardcore I think the second season, and then just dropped it.
• How is Richard immortal, and then why is he mortal in the end?
• WTF is the light in the center of the island?

These are just questions that are coming off the top of my head. I thought it was awful to just end the finale with a 2 and a half hour reunion only to find out that they’re all united in death. Seriously…they’re all dead?

I feel like I wasted so much time on this show, anybody saying it was a great finale has become just to emotionally attached to all the characters that anything would seem good. Even them all…being…dead.

Except for Ben, but they don’t explain that either. He’s just chilling outside the church that’s in…purgatory? Earth? Where the hell are they that once they walk into a church they get to walk into heaven or wherever that white light leads?

Seriously people…you cannot be happy about this ending. If you are, you’ve been duped hard.

Excerpt from:
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Security companies have been talking about social engineering in the distribution of adware, malware and spyware for years now. In the early days of social engineering discussions, the mechanism for tricking end users into installing potentially unwanted software focused on such avenues as IRC and IM services. Basically, the end user is lulled into a false sense of security that a link is safe to click since it is coming from a “friend” via a social network.

The companies behind adware and spyware have always been innovative and typically one-step ahead of the curve when it comes to installation methods. Their survival is dependent upon their ability to have their software installed on computers. Naturally, social networks like Facebook will be prime targets as a potential source for installations.

Anatomy of an Attack

Several sources (Computer World, InformationWeek) are reporting a wide-spread adware attack on Facebook Monday. We can gain insight into just how powerful social engineering can be when mixed with a very popular social network like Facebook for adware companies.

The attack involved a Facebook application promising “the sexiest video ever”.  When Facebook users installed the app, they were told they needed to update their FLV Player. This isn’t a completely uncommon occurrence in and of itself when watching a video online. When the link was clicked to update their FLV Player, the end user received an installation of HotBar.

The attack was contained solely on Facebook. It did not involve installing any type of Trojan or virus that was then sent out via infected computers. The infections were limited only to those people who clicked the link to update their FLV Player. In a fifteen hour period (the time it took Facebook to remove the threat), AVG Technologies is reporting 300,000 infections. At peak times of the attack, AVG was receiving 40,000 reports per hour.  These are astounding numbers, particularly when you keep in mind these are detections by one security company (those infected who use AVG and opt into sending threat detections to AVG servers).

Source Behind the Attack

Hotbar is the current brand being used for the software previously known as Zango. The HotBar brand was resurrected after Blinkx bought Zango in the wake of Zango being foreclosed on by their creditors and entering into bankruptcy. Since this is not the first major incident of questionable installation of HotBar under the ownership of Blinkx. It would seem that Blinkx learned little from Zango’s run in with the FTC over charges of nonconsensual installations, charges which lead to a fine of $3 million dollars and the company’s ultimate undoing as advertisers stayed away.

The use of contextual adware, like HotBar, has existed within the affiliate marketing channel since their existence. Initially they were allowed by the major networks (even before the proliferation of CPA Networks). Even when allowed, this form of marketing was highly controversial. Eventually all the major networks disallowed this type of marketing, in a large part because of legal actions being taken by regulatory agencies against some of the larger adware companies over installation tactics.

As CPA Networks began to expand into the market place, many of these agencies openly allowed contextual adware marketing (and still do). The DirectTrack software, used by many CPA Networks, is programmed to recognize and accommodate contextual advertising. Even so, contextual adware marketing became the “black sheep” of the affiliate marketing channel.

How the Playing Field has Changed

Over the last several months, contextual adware advertising has donned yet another new face, under the name of PPV or CPV marketing. There is a sector within the affiliate marketing community who are promoting contextual adware marketing, such as through HotBar, as a legitimate form of marketing by affiliates. By virtue of just saying it is a “legitimate” marketing channel, many appear to be accepting the statement as fact.

One of the primary defenses of contextual adware marketing I’ve seen is that “it’s not spyware, it’s adware and the end user wants it.” As the Facebook attack demonstrates, the end user doesn’t always want it.  Sometimes the end user is tricked into installation. The past issues of nonconsensual installations that invited outside regulators like the FTC have not gone away. Nor is the label “adware” necessarily connotative of a benign software application, as implied by those promoting PPV/CPV marketing. Even Zango recognized that fact by virtue of their failed legal attempt to force Kaspersky and PCTools to declassify their software as adware.

I’ve been following contextual adware for almost ten years now. I’ve seen little change in the fundamentals of how contextual adware companies operate. The most significant change I’ve noticed of late is the seemingly willingness by some within our industry to openly accept and embrace this type of “marketing”.

Excerpt from:
The Power Of Social Media Networks In Adware Distribution

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Well, this was an update over 2 years in the making. Yep, the last time I updated my Affiliate Marketing Guide was in April of 2008. You can imagine a lot of things have changed since then, a lot of the links were dead/irrelevant.

I’ve scoured quite a few industry blogs and looked at the past year or so of content and was able to find some good picks. I’ve added some new categories to keep up with the times (PPV is a popular category now). The more recent articles I popped in at the top. You can view the guide here.

The Most Important Part

So, I’m sure I missed a bunch of great articles. This is where it’s your turn to add to the guide, almost like a Wiki or something. If there’s a good article relating to any of the categories of the guide, post it as a comment here and as long as it’s good, I’ll add it to the guide. Thanks!

Here’s a list of the newly added articles :

Nickycakes Newbie Guide
Free Affiliate Marketing Guide
Landing Pages And The Urgency Of Time
Mad lib form style testing results
Photoshop Guide For Affiliates
Landing Page Rotation Script
6 Seductive CTR Tips
Tuesday Tips – Improving Landing Page CTR
The 1 Penny Tip
Top 100 TrafficVance Targets
TrafficVance – Demographics & Tips
PPV Network Reviews
A Simple Way to Split Test PPV Landing Pages Without a Rotator
3 Ways to Increase Your PPV Landing Page CTR
Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns
Media Buying 101: Introduction To Inventory (A Step-By-Step Guide) – Part 1
Tips on Media Buying
Optimizing Google Content Campaigns
Google content network basic strategy
The Beginners Guide To Advertising On Facebook
Plenty of Fish. Plenty of Money.
Free Geo IP Javascript To Increase Conversions On Your Campaigns
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 1 – Intro & Tools
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 2 – URLs, URL Variables, and using Live HTTP Headers
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 3 – Basics of Assessing Your Target
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 4 – cURL
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 5 – A Basic Scraper
Monetizing International Traffic
Becoming An Advertiser : Part 1 (Overview)
CS1.1 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 1
CS1.2 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 2 – Keyword Research
CS1.3 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 3 – Landing Pages and Tracking
CS1.4 – PPC Case Study Part 4 – Advice, Tips and Campaign Structure
CS1.5 – PPC Case Study Part 5 – Campaign Update and a Top Secret Tool
CS1.6 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 6 – Stats Recap and Going Forward
How I Generated $1,700,000 in Auto Sales Despite a Weak Economy
Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Results
How I made $7,144.00 using TrafficVance.
NEW Facebook Ads
Plentyoffish Self Serve Advertising.

Excerpted from:
Affiliate Marketing Guide UPDATE

Search Engine Keywords:

• how make money with trafficvance

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As the mobile marketing arena heats up, it only makes sense that affiliate networks become immersed in mobile. A company called OfferMobi is using this week’s ad:tech conference in San Francisco to launch what it claims is the “first U.S.-based affiliate network focused on the mobile web.”

While initial details are sketchy and the company’s website is bare bones, OfferMobi says it is launching with “over 50 U.S. and international offers” and that its network is “completely risk-free” to advertisers because of a model based entirely on CPA (Cost Per Action). The company is working in partnership with Ring Revenue to also provide targeted pay per call services for advertisers who don’t have a call center solution.

Part of OfferMobi’s pitch is providing education and assistance to both advertisers and affiliates. The company recognizes it is forging new ground as “the next generation in performance marketing,” so it provides free mobile tools, such as “3Search” and “Mobile Preview,” to help its users. OfferMobi makes mobile-ready landing pages available to advertisers that are compatible with the majority of mobile phones and devices.

OfferMobi says it can help advertisers build their own custom mobile landing pages and execute creative.

One looming question about OfferMobi’s entry into the marketplace is how other affiliate networks will react. A quick scan of the major affiliate networks’ websites shows little if any mention of mobile capabilities. Nonetheless, mobile is certainly on the minds of some of the leading players.

 Kerri Pollard of Commission Junction says that in 2010, “we expect opportunity in terms of social media and mobile.” With the smartphone market booming, Kerri says Commission Junction will “gain a heck of a lot more traction [in mobile] than in years past.”

 Jonathan Levine of LinkShare agrees his company is well-positioned to be a mobile leader because of parent company Rakuten, but he also says “the thing that nobody’s figured out yet, in the US, is the common wallet or payment system. Something we have figured out with Rakuten in Japan. …I think the company that figures out how to broker the common wallet hurdle is going to do very well on mobile.”

Larry Adams of the Google Affiliate Network thinks the increased sophistication of smartphones, particularly in their ability to browse websites, will help fuel adoption of mobile marketing. “I think with a lot more smartphones out there people will become more comfortable and start buying stuff on their phones,” says Adams. But he points out that until e-commerce sites have more mobile experiences, there won’t be a “huge opportunity” for affiliate marketing.

If the current lack of mobile-specific offerings by leading affiliate networks is any indication, it appears that OfferMobi has gained at least a short-term advantage in the mobile marketing space.

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Mobile Affiliate Network Launches at ad:tech

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Haven’t made a post in a while, I’d like to get back to posting more but I’ve said that before, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve had some industry friends come out with a few things though and figured they were worth sharing.

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Is Twitter getting into the business of undermining its own developers? The microblog powerhouse announced last week that it had purchased Atebits, the company which created Tweetie, one of the most popular Twitter applications for both the iPhone and the Mac. With the move, Twitter both made the app free (instead of the $1.99 that iPhone users had been playing) and renamed it Twitter for iPhone. Twitter also announced an official application for BlackBerry.

Does that mean that Twitter is jumping over its outside developers to put its own business products in front of users?

In a note to the development community, Twitter’s Ryan Sarver said Twitter’s approach is to ease user confusion. He posted a note on the Twitter Developer Talk Google Group, saying:

“When we dug in a little bit we realized that it was causing massive confusion among user’s who had an iPhone and were looking to use Twitter for the first time. They would head to the App Store, search for Twitter and would see results that included a lot of apps that had nothing to do with Twitter and a few that did, but a new user wouldn’t find what they were looking for and give up. That is a lost user for all of us.”

Twitter founder Ev Williams echoed that stand in a blog post of his own:

“People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.”

The development community then has to wait and see how Twitter competes with the development ecosystem it has created. Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur weighs in here,  as do these commenters here. Many critics are pointing to the comments of Twitter investor Fred Wilson, who said that Twitter needs to be taking care of the basic holes it had in its product when it launched:

“Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.”

Twitter is in the business of business seems to be the bottom line, sometimes those business goals are contrary to the needs of the ecosystem of developers that has grown around it. ReveNews writer David Lewis posted an apt comparison on the way Twitter is now treating its developers to the way affiliate networks sometimes treat affiliates. Such moves by Twitter should be a warning to application developers who have built their business solely around any single platform…Apple app developers I’m talking to you. Diversification and ability to stand alone outside the platform is obviously key to long term survival.

See more here:
Twitter vs. Its Developers?

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Yesterday I laid out the rather unsettling truth — how affiliate marketing has evolved from something sexy that every brand “must have” into a  “necessary evil” strategy.  Everyone from state politicians to marketers themselves have piled on to create problems for the performance marketing industry.  With this in mind I ask…

How can marketers work to grow affiliate-related revenue, new customers and better quality leads in a world that’s already decided “fewer affiliates are better?”

Today, I’ll report on how some brands are boldly going where few have gone before with affiliates, to ring the cash register and create better leads.  Now I know there are more stories out there so let’s hear more stories in comments… yes?

Clashing Strategies
Direct marketers (in particular) are becoming increasingly proficient in Web strategies like search.  And this means they increasingly find themselves butting heads with their own affiliates — many of whom already have staked out valuable digital turf.

So is it worth playing nice with affiliates?  If so, how can marketers maintain healthy doses of affiliate-generated sales while maximizing incremental revenue and avoiding cannibalization of existing search campaigns?

These questions have no easy answers.  The competitive search environment is leading many marketers to prefer Web affiliates that send incremental visitors — those resulting in sales or leads that otherwise may not occur as a result of marketers’ own efforts.

Armed with affordable, easy-to-use Web marketing analytics packages, marketers are having an easier time gaining the vital understanding needed to produce such cravings for efficiency.  In the end, marketers are hoping affiliates can bring them customers or leads that they, themselves, cannot access.

Marketing Channel Attribution
As if there weren’t enough issues there’s now another:  channel attribution or “scoring” for what marketing strategy caused the eventual sale and to what degree.

Marketers (retailers in particular) increasingly realize that shoppers click around and touch multiple marketing campaigns before purchasing. A customer initially may be referred to a site by a paid search ad.   He/she may then return to the site via a comparison shopping engine and then again through a CPA affiliate, at which point he uses a promo code from a direct mail piece — generating four distinct (often unconnected) points of marketing cost.

Affiliate programs are sometimes targeted — with some marketers reconciling affiliate program performance with the influence of various other marketing channels customers come in contact with (as part of the path to purchase).  This has caused quite a ruckus as well.  Some marketers have been practicing “zeroing out”/negating affiliate commissions — sometimes transparently and sometimes not.

But marketers say the only thing they’re zeroing is zeroing-in on cost efficiency — moving beyond a singular goal of increasing sales or leads.  It’s rather ironic if you think about it considering that the channel works on pure performance (unlike others).  It’s also most often the channel that delivers the “last touch” (last click) before the customer transacts.

But this “last click” is often precisely why affiliates get dinged.  Brands tend to see the associated cost as somehow “extra” or inflationary.  As an example, an instance where a coupon gets redeemed in addition to the affiliate commission… occurring within 12 hours of an email to the marketer’s list.  What actually prompted the sale and to what degree?

More and more brands are wanting to know what works, why and how they can “turn the dials” to create more buying behavior.  Not to mention achieve a smaller cost to return each online sale.  This is a marked change from the more “hands-off” practice of years past where efficiency was all but blindly assumed.

But is such an analytical approach necessary or beneficial and to what degree?  Doesn’t it fight a more holistic approach to Web marketing?

Experiment, Share and Manage Risk
What’s the secret sauce for affiliate marketing success in these trying times?  In a few words:  investment and risk. Breaking away from the pack is a factor of how much risk brands are (or are not) taking in forming deeper partnerships with affiliates.  Higher risk tends to yield higher payoffs:  more new customers and incremental leads.

As an example, affiliate management company AMWSO used an award-winning video approach to drive sales for conscious goods marketer Gaiam.  The focus was balanced across large and small affiliates.  Similarly, Paul Moss, of Moss Affiliate Marketing’s approach at Insurance.com involved selectively underwriting affiliate search optimization efforts.

I say again underwriting affiliate SEO efforts.  Truly bold and gutsy.

Both AMWSO and Moss’s firm are using a highly measured approach to ensure ROI — one that involves data-sharing with affiliates.  This isn’t un-measured or renegade.  And it’s not an affiliate versus marketer situation.  This is true teamwork where marketers actively outsource to affiliates in areas that they don’t want to hold expertise in, yet gain value from associating with a affiliates that do.

“Optimization of campaigns cannot occur in a vacuum — it’s a team effort,” says Chris Sanderson of AMWSO, who agrees with Moss that marketers who take a cautious, yet trusting, view of affiliates see better results.

Use New Tools
Marketers and affiliates have begun to use tools to leverage online social media — video, images, blogs and various, easy-to-use publishing platforms.  New tools like PopShops.com — hailed as the largest searchable collection of affiliate products — are building blocks for innovation, offering opportunity to affiliates and advertisers.

According to ValueClick Vice President of Corporate Strategy John Ardis, most marketers hold back on providing affiliates with the simplest of tools.  In a recent conversation with me he cited giving affiliates the ability to “deep link” (bring visitors directly to product pages) on e-commerce sites.

“A great many marketers are not fully realizing what’s available to them today,” Ardis says.

Make Change: Traditional and Experimental
How can marketers work to grow affiliate programs in safe ways that make sense?

“Set affiliates up as an extension of your company — so they’re complementary.  Yes, some cannibalism will exist, but it’s foolish to think you can overpower the Internet and don’t need affiliates to achieve comprehensive coverage,” says Moss.

Growth and expansion go hand in hand with expansion into social media.  But we cannot forget bread-and-butter strategies: search marketers, landing page optimization affiliates, the tried-and-true stuff.   Some brands are diversifying their affiliate bases in traditional ways that involve rolling up sleeves and interacting with larger numbers of smaller affiliates.

Based on my research to pull together this story, it’s important to note that there’s no silver bullet here.  This involves work — contacting potential affiliate partners using e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook, telephone, etc.  Some marketers are focusing on a larger group of smaller affiliates.  The goal is to grow the affiliate base and take advantage of emerging social networks.  These are the brands to watch.

Even with limited tools and staff, some marketers are quietly investing in grassroots approaches that involve rolling up sleeves, “dialing and e-mailing for dollars.”  It’s good, old-fashioned work with less reliance on large affiliate networks for new partners.

Looking forward, social media’s role remains unclear, although we’re seeing early participants.

Ultimately,  some suggest we’re on the cusp of a customer recommendation-based model that looks like affiliate multilevel marketing — turning everyone into an affiliate.  Witness Amway’s Fanista, ToldYa.com and RadicalBuy.com as early signs of scalable recommendation-based affiliation.

Buzzillions.com hails itself as a Web site of “product reviews from people like you.”  This affiliate collects and displays customer reviews — from individuals verified as actual buyers of the products — provided by participating advertisers, like Staples and Zappos.com.  Buzzillions.com’s goal is to help consumers make educated purchasing decisions.

“We’re in the business of putting an end to buyer’s remorse,” the Web site claims.

And let’s not forget Alvenda and their pilot client, 1800Flowers over on Facebook.

According to experts I’ve spoken to lately, given new Web 2.0 technologies, more people than ever are publishing their opinions online.  As this trend continues, we won’t see a few affiliates rise to the top but, rather, a large base of new affiliates continually emerging.

This, they say, is reality.  And ignoring the ‘long tail’ of affiliates is becoming a thing of the past.  What do you think?

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Affiliate marketing: Redeveloping An Underdeveloped Channel Part II

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Over the past few months the industry has seemed to gone through some slight changes. Rebill offers for the most part are not run like they were before. I know this because of what’s happened to my own traffic, getting approval on my own offer, and then friends that I’ve talked to who have had to go back to “legit” affiliate offers.

So now what? Some food for thought…

Oldies but Goodies

Offers like credit reports, auto insurance, dating, etc. These are the classics but they’re offers that have been running strong this entire time for a reason…they convert. Some of the very first offers I ran back in the day were all 3 of those I listed above, and all 3 were profitable. I also see Google ads as well as Facebook ads for all 3 of those, which tells me that it looks like they’re converting just like the old days.

Mobile/IQ

Mobile used to be the hot “shady” thing to do, when rebilling people for $9.99 was unethical. My oh my if we only knew we would rebill for 10x that amount and go to bed with a smile on our faces (’our’ just referring to the entire industry). Mobile offers are doing well from what I hear. I see some ads on Myspace and other teenage oriented sites, and I also hear incenting these offers on app traffic is working nicely.

Edu

If you take a closer peek at Facebook and a few other places, you’ll see a few people running education offers. These have been kind of a “sleeper” for a while now, I ran them a while ago with some success. The only thing you have to watch out for is quality, they can end up nailing you on it. But other than that it’s a nice leadgen with a good payout for just completing a form with no credit card.

Good Ole Fashioned Business

Maybe it’s time for you to take some of those rebill profits and pour them into a business idea you’ve had in your mind for the past year. Don’t forget that affiliate marketing is just one of the ways to make money online. Build a site that people want to visit every day or a service that they don’t mind paying to use. In the age of Facebook/Digg/Reddit/etc, sharing has never been easier. This makes viral sites all the more easier to go viral.

Just some things to think about in case you’re a deer in headlights now that the FTC truck is speeding at you.

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Affiliate marketing is receiving some not so great publicity…again. This time it comes from Rik Ferguson over at TrendMicro blog as he reveals a Facebook Account Upgrade Scam, where fan pages promote a Gold Facebook account upgrade. Of course, there is no such thing as a gold Facebook account.

From Rik Ferguson’s blog post (bolding by me for emphasis):

So what’s the point for the scammer? Well if you follow all the instructions, you first invite all your friends to come and check out this (cough) great deal. Then, if you are credulous enough to click the button, you are informed that in order to access the Account Upgrade page you must complete “1 quick, free survey”, different versions of the scam page offer different surveys, but this is where the money is made.

The survey I tested linked (via a couple of affiliate marketing services) to a “Werewolf vs. Vampire” quiz which promised to tell me which I am (surely I should know that already?) at the end of the ten questions I am invited to enter my mobile phone number to receive my results. If I do that I am agreeing to pay a £9.00 joining fee followed by £9.00 every week until I cancel my membership via SMS.

Of course, I immediately wanted to know which affiliate networks were involved considering TrendMirco’s report of around one million Facebook user’s being subscribed to the numerous fake gold account fan pages.

The Gory (Albeit Probably Boring) Details

Although, it was stated that the scam had been reported to Facebook and the content was most likely being removed, I got out my shovel and began digging. A quick Google search showed the content was being removed, but I was able to quickly pull up some of the offending pages courtesy of Google cache (see below).

The first thing I noticed was that the affiliate behind the fake Facebook upgrades appears to be geo-targeting the offers displayed to the end user. While Rik Ferguson obviously received UK cell phone offers, the offers displayed to me were US based offers (see below).

The actual offers differed at times, but all pretty much followed the same CPA network click stream. The irony of one of the quizzes being called “How Dumb Are You” was not lost on me.

The domain responsible for the above display on Facebook is corporate-promo-mfg.com. This domain was consistent throughout all of my research.

The affiliate link on corporate-promo-mfg.com is for CPALead with the publisher id 42109. Whois records for CPALead.com show the company as located in Wisconsin. The contact information on their web site indicates they are located in Las Vegas, NV.

CPALead redirects the click to click2go.org with an affiliate id of 3013 and sub id 42109 (passing the original publisher id). Click2go uses a Privacy Whois service, however the IP Location is tied to TattoMedia.

TattoMedia is certainly a player in these types of SMS ads and I’ve come across them numerous times in connection with adware usage. At this point, CPALead is acting as an affiliate/publisher of TattoMedia.

Click2Go then redirects the click to webventures.directtrack.com with the aff id CD43 and sub id 3013 (the id for CPALead as an affiliate with TattoMedia). Note that at this point, the original affiliate/publisher id is no longer being carried through on the actual tracking links. If you go to webventures.directtrack.com, you are brought to a sign-up page for MundoMedia.com. MundoMedia uses a Privacy Whois service as well, but their web site shows contact information for Toronto and Los Angeles.

MundoMedia  redirects the click to linktrack66.com containing the same aff id and sub id. Linktrack66.com is another tracking domain associated with MundoMedia.

Finally the click is redirected to MyMindQuizzes.com where the actual survey resides. MyMindQuizzes also uses a Privacy Whois service but resides on the same IP address as MundoMedia. Sometimes CPA networks will host a sign-up form for an advertiser on their own servers; other times it may be the CPA network themselves in ownership of the offer.  Looking at the Terms of Service page on MyMindQuizzes, I found mention of the company name Neo Image.

The short version is I found three CPA Networks involved in these deceptive Facebook ads: CPALead, TattoMedia and MundoMedia.

The Plot Thickens

You may be asking yourself “So what, the fraudulent ads were reported and Facebook removed the pages. It’s just a little bit of bad PR that will most likely quickly fade in people’s memory.”

If only that was case. The reality is that people who are making some nice change, regardless of how they are making it, aren’t always willing to give it up quickly. TrendMicro reported the incident on Monday. On Wednesday I did a search through Facebook (not Google but Facebook) and I found several new and active fake Facebook Gold Account fan pages with fan totals in the tens of thousands. When I viewed the profile pictures of one of these new accounts I saw pictures were added Monday. Even while Facebook was removing pages, new ones were evidently being set up.

Some of those pages are now gone, but I see new active pages again today with one simple search.

And while Facebook may be attempting to keep up the affiliate links involved remain active. There does not appear to have been any termination of the affiliate account by the CPA networks. Indeed, if you recall I went from a Google cached page on the account on Facebook to even track which CPA Networks were involved.

The Implications

There are several implications to this type of situation. The most obvious is  while the incidents were initially reported in the UK, they are now happening in the US as well. There is no way this ad promotion will meet the FTC guidelines regarding deceptive advertising practices. You don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that one out. When you start hitting numbers of consumers in the million plus range being potentially impacted, it’s almost like screaming for the FTC big stick to head your way. Everyone in the click stream trail is at legal risk.

What about those consumers? If you look at the last screen shot I posted, you’ll see that Facebook groups against this one particular scam are beginning to form. I’ll hazard a wild guess and say consumers aren’t happy about it either.

Is it a wonder that security companies tend to be less than affectionate towards affiliates? This type of activity certainly doesn’t help our case, particularly when they have seen affiliate links tied to scams, adware and the such for years now.  It should be noted that Rik Ferguson didn’t say “CPA Network affiliates”, he said “affiliate marketing”.

The lack of transparency build into the sub-affiliate model should be neither an inherent excuse nor a mechanism to hide behind when it comes to ensuring fraudulent activities do not tarnish and stain our whole industry. It’s not like we are talking about an affiliate who is capable of generating only a limited number of ad views.  If a network cannot monitor traffic from an affiliate at that level, then they probably shouldn’t be a network.  CPA Networks must become more active in establishing acceptable marketing practices, monitoring their programs and taking action on offenses within the industry and as an industry, we must be clear to those outside of our industry, including consumers, that these types of fraudulent marketing practices are unacceptable.

These types of incidents impact our industry as a whole and how we function and navigate within it.  Please stay tuned for Part Two of the post.

I wish that I could say “the end” but it’s not the end of story.  That’s will Part 2 of this post.

Go here to read the rest:
Black Hat Affiliate Tactics in the Facebook Era

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