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As a new player at Ten Golden Rules, part of my role will be to help our clients develop sound interactive marketing plans that will have a positive impact on their bottom line sales goals. This philosophy is ingrained into the very fiber of the Ten Golden Rules team. We strategize, test, execute and measure our programs every single day. But how does this methodology apply to our B2B clientele? Traditionally, you might think that B2B marketing innovation has always lagged behind its B2C counterparts. Not so anymore.

Beyond the catchy music and clever design, what I love about this video are the statistics.

81% of B2B companies maintain a company account or profile on social media vs. 67% of B2C companies

75% of B2B companies micro-blog vs. 49% of B2C companies

As the video suggests, no longer are the B2B marketers lagging behind their B2C cohorts. In some cases, they’re even leading the charge. We’ve seen the onset of the new digital C-Suite who not only enjoy using technology, they embrace it. And with 93% of B2B buyers starting the purchase cycle via search, doesn’t it make sense for your company to be searchable no matter what your business?

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Who Leads Marketing Innovation?

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Editor’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from material Jim Kukral, former Managing Editor of ReveNews and author of Attention! This Book Will Make You Money, used during his keynote at Affiliate Summit East 2010. It is published here with Jim’s permission. Rumor has it the Affiliate Super Friends appeared during the keynote, that indeed is all Jim’s fault. Enjoy.

Did you know that 4.6 million bottles of 5 Hour Energy Drink are sold each week in the USA alone? According to The New York Times, Bill Pecoriello, chief executive of Consumer Edge Research, estimated that energy shot sales could reach $700 million this year, nearly double last year’s $370 million. Today, 5-Hour Energy accounts for about 80 percent of the rapidly expanding market.

The question is how did a relatively new product gain such traction with the US consumer? Here are five valuable lessons you can take away from this product and their marketing.

#1 Reason – “Energy” Is In The Product Name

I’m a huge fan of saying what you do. If you are a plumber and your name is Angel, your business name should be Angel’s Plumbing. If you are the world’s best expert at databases, then you should be calling yourself The Database Diva, not “Aviva, LLC” which was her original name. If you are an amazing resource of tax information for small businesses owners, you should be calling yourself TaxMama, not Eva Rosenberg Tax Services.

Lesson: Say What You Do

#2 Reason – It Helps You Get Energy

You’re tired,  you’re down. You need energy. You can go and drink coffee all day long, but then your breath smells and you have to pee every five minutes. In other words, it solves problems which is what every successful product does.

Lesson: Solve Problems For Your Customer

#3 Reason – It Helps You For Five Hours

Not one hour, not 12 hours, not a half hour. Five hours. When you think about it that number is of significant importance to their marketing because people find it believable. A product with a claim that sounds outrageous, no matter how true, won’t sell. Consumers have to believe it to buy it. If it was 12 hours, nobody would buy it, they’d think it was fake or like a speed pill. If it was one hour, again, people wouldn’t buy it, they’d say “Who needs one hour of energy only?”

Five hours is exactly what you need, and want, and they know it. Need a pick me up after lunch to get you through the rest of the day? Drink 5 Hour Energy Drink. Need to hit the clubs at Midnight in Vegas and dance the night away? Drink 5 Hour Energy Drink.

Lesson: Think About What Your Customers Really Need

#4 Reason – It’s Very Portable

You can drink it in seconds. Not like a giant Monster energy drink that you have to chug-a-lug around with you all day. Not like a big coffee mug you have to carry around. You don’t feel bloated after drinking it. While all their competitors went big, five hour energy was smart enough to go small.

Lesson: Be The Alternative

#5 Reason – It’s Convenient

You can stick it in your gym bag or your work backpack. You can leave it in your glove compartment or put it in your coat pocket. Since it’s small, it’s convenient.

Lesson: Make It Easy

Whether you are a business or a brand, or you sell a product or a service, you can learn quite a bit from 5 Hour Energy. People look for new things all the time. Are you creating them for them? Not everyone loves coffee you know.

Now is your chance to take these important lessons and work them into your own strategy. Pretty soon you might just find yourself owning the majority share of customers in your industry.

Source:
Five Marketing Lessons You Can Learn From 5 Hour Energy Drink

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There’s a buzz in the office.  Excitement! There’s just something about Affiliate Summit East that puts a skip in our step and apparently, a rhyme in our writing (albeit, admittedly, not all that great).

Our Meet the Share Results Team blog series is all about, well, meeting the team here.  They’ll all be at Affiliate Summit!  We started with Jamie, and next we met Maranda.

Today, I sat down with Le Michelle Nguyen.  I like Le.  Her Skype message says “fettucini, linguini, martini, bikini!” and that’s just the kinda’ fun loving girl that she is.  She’s passionate about what she does at Share Results, and the best part is, she’s really quite good at it.

Good combination, no? You can stop by and chat with Le at our booth at the ASE conference.  The team will be at RG 2017, so come on over and discuss your affiliate marketing business and your goals.

Janice Scrim: Le, I know you’re very excited about attending ASE 2010.  What are you most looking forward to?
Le Michelle Nguyen: Meeting up with friends and making new ones. I love meeting people, period.  I’ve noticed that as the years go by, there are more and more people who go to this event.  You know if you meet someone under the guise of work, they may one day change companies and roles over the time. What I love about conferences like Affiliate Summit, of course it’s a place to do business, but it’s always nice knowing it’s the people you know will be there.

JS: You’ve been with Share Results for 5 years.  What do you think separates SR from some of the other networks and software providers out there?
LMN: We’re not the biggest network out there and we don’t want to be. We’re boutique and we know our affiliates and merchants by name.  You’re not just a number and you can call us anytime. And when it comes to our software, it’s a proof of concept— the software that you can licence from us is same platform that powers our very own network.  We’re cut from the same cloth! We constantly gather feedback from our partners to make it better software, simple to use and built for your needs.

JS: What kind of affiliates would most greatly benefit from a partnership with Share Results? What about merchants?
LMN: If you have a strong female or family audience with reach in the education, apparel and travel segments, you’ll find much success in our network.  Our network aims to partner with merchants whose ideal customer is a life time-customer. We employ this way of long tail thinking because we want our affiliates to be able to promote a product or service that has legs. (Really nice legs at that!)

JS: When it comes to supporting affiliates in building their online business, what do you do best?
LMN: I’m good at matching up affiliates with ideal merchants they should be promoting based on the types of placements they use.

JS: What are some of the challenges that affiliates face in today’s affiliate marketing space?
LMN: Being overwhelmed with “stuff.”  Whether it’s web metrics, plug-ins, software or taxes laws. There is an abundance of information out there for an affiliate to know.  The challenge is, how do you stay on top of it all? That’s why I think it’s important for affiliates to set personal and business goals for themselves. It can be measured by the amount of traffic to their site per month, how much they earn in Q4 or moving from a part-time to full-time affiliate marketing.  These benchmarks help you set the tone on what tools, programs and commissions you need to reach the next level. J

JS: What kind of support do you offer merchants to ensure they are expanding their a) brand recognition and b) sales potential?
LMN: I make sure I’m always available for questions.  Especially when a merchant is just launching or looking to boost their program exposure, I expect a lot of questions.  It’s a two-way street: I don’t want to make a cake unless I know what flavor you like.  We can better support our merchants’ goals and objectives for their affiliate program if we know how what kind of ingredients they plan bring to the table. For instance, I would always encourage a merchant to invest in doing some offline marketing in conjunction with their online efforts.

JS: The most recent 2010 AffStat Report indicates that most affiliates in the affiliate marketing space are just starting out.   How do you help ensure the success of newbie affiliates?
LMN: It’s no secret; figure out what you like and run with that. There are number of ways affiliates can make money, but if this is something you’re going to invest your time and energy into, you want to be sure it’s something you love writing about, or talking about. You should talk about it and promote as if it was natural. If you don’t like gardening, it’s going to difficult to build a store around gardening supplies. But if you love baby clothes, then…

JS: You’re a fun-lovin’, think-outside-the-box kinda’ gal—what do you love doing outside of work?
LMN: In addition to being a digital marketer, I’m a freelance photographer, a blogger and I play soccer and do ballet. I also own two of the cutest little dachshunds dogs you will ever meet, Belle & Michigan. Plus I can cook a mean roast chicken.

Wanna meet Le in person? She’s this charming, and then some.  Meet up with her at booth RG 2017 or email her at le [at] shareresults [dot] com.

Thursday, we are wrapping up our Meet the Team series, and will be introducing you to Melissa Del Gaudio, who will be at the booth to tell you all about our software solution.  Be sure to tune in again then, and SEE YOU IN NYC!

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Meet Up with Le for so much Glee, at the Affiliate Summit East Conference-y!

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As we lead up to our departure for Affiliate Summit East, we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce our team members who are counting sleeps until New York City.

Yesterday we introduced Jamie Fortunaso, our Digital Marketing Manager, and today, I sat down with Maranda Moses to chat about what makes the Share Results world go round.

Janice Scrim: Like Jamie, you have been a Share Results staple for a number of years. What do you like best about working at Share Results?
Maranda Moses: Working in the online retail space in general is so much fun and very flexible in terms of the various digital marketing opportunities that are available. That includes the benefit of seeing an affiliate or merchant venture grow from an unknown entity to a successful profitable business with our help. I’ve also developed some really great relationships with people along the way that goes beyond just being about business, which is also important. Oh yeah, and our team isn’t half bad either.

JS: You are an Affiliate Summit attendee veteran. What do you think this conference offers affiliates that other affiliate marketing events miss?
MM: There are some amazing opportunities at ASE. I just blogged about some of them the other day—check out my guide to standing out at a conference.

JS: A big part of your role at Share Results is providing affiliates with strategies to build their online businesses. What’s your number one tip for making it big in the industry?
MM: As a writer, we’re often told by literary experts to “write what you know.” I would say the same rule applies to affiliates in digital marketing: promote what you know! I would also say it’s imperative to diversify and cultivate organic traffic. Too often we’ve seen affiliates in the past put all their eggs in one basket, then if a merchant shuts down for whatever reason, the affiliate hasn’t expanded or looked to other merchant offers or methods to promote to their audience.

JS: Share Results has really started branching out, and is reaching new verticals. Tell me a bit about this expansion and where Share Results is headed in terms of merchant partnerships.
MM: These are really exciting times for Share Results because we’re at a convergence where we’re combining our areas of expertise with new areas we’re on the cusp of developing all under our brand. We’re expecting to see expansion in our travel, education and electronics verticals. We’re also perfectly positioned to expand within the Canadian market, in which we already have a foothold. These verticals and markets have always been top of mind, but we’re finally seeing ourselves beginning to cultivate these areas further.

JS: You are an established Canadian author and have an incredible talent for writing. I know you work with a lot of affiliate Bloggers—how do you use your skills to help them develop?
MM: I used to run my own blog and as a result, I gained a lot of valuable insight from that and my other writing experience. I know what affiliate bloggers go through in terms of trying to find relevant content to publish and coming up with creative ways to attract readers. In the past I have stressed to affiliates that quality is better than quantity. I’ve helped bloggers learn how to craft tailored quality content be it blog posts, advertorials, etc.

This is an exceptionally important skill to have these days, because not all merchants have the resources to establish their own content team. Ask Melanie Seery, she’s an experienced affiliate out in the industry that is extremely qualified and is highly sought after to produce quality outsourced content.

Being known as a top-quality blogger also means you do not have to be at the mercy of a merchant if the turn-around time on receiving content is too long. Rather than waiting on a merchant to deliver a write up about a product or particular trends, I’ve been a strong advocate of writing and publishing quality content yourself (with the merchant’s final approval of course). By doing this, you save time and have a lot of room for creativity to promote your preferred product or service.

Maranda will be at the Share Results booth at Affiliate Summit East. If you’ve got questions about our network or just some tips on how to build your affiliate business, she’s a great resource—and pretty darn friendly too. Pop by booth RG 2017 to chat, or schedule some one-on-one time with her. You can email her at Maranda [at] shareresults [dot] com.

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Meet Maranda Moses at ASE 2010

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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.

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Four years ago, I started a tomato garden.  I’m no gardening expert and I don’t have the greenest thumb, but I do love a fresh garden tomato, and that was enough of an incentive to get my hands dirty.

So I prepared the earth, fertilized it with tender-loving care and carefully planted my tomato plant.  Oh how I loved my tomato plant, watering it, ensuring its roots remained well covered and removing any weeds that could potentially take away from its growth and prosperity.

This continued for many weeks, and soon I began to see the fruits of my labor.  And they were red, and plump.  One day, when I checked in on my beloveds, I thought, finally, they were ready to be plucked.  Maybe just one more day.

And when the next day came, I raced to the backyard, eager and excited, with my woven basket in hand, ready for my bountiful harvest.  But apparently, I wasn’t the only one.  Waiting as patiently as I, was a family of racoons, who throughout the night had gorged themselves, leaving one single tomato on my lawn—with a bite taken out of it.

I was devastated.  So devastated in fact, that it took me four long years to get over my loss, and pick up my spade to try again.

What’s the point in trying again, the racoons will only eat them!

Why would I do all that hard work, only to fail.  Let the farmers handle the tomatoes!

Negative talk can sometimes get the best of us, especially when we’ve invested so much of ourselves into something that we feel passionate about.  When that negative talk turns into stalling, procrastinating and eventually abandonment, you know that you’re in trouble, and that it’s time to get back on track.

Affiliates can often experience this kind of frustration when building their online business.  You try something new out, and despite your best efforts, it is less successful than you had hoped.  You learn a new online marketing strategy and instead of making a return on your investment, you end up with a loss.  You get active with social media, but you don’t manage to connect.  You invest in a PPC campaign, get thousands of impressions and lots of clicks, but not a single conversion.

The key here, is to keep your goal at the forefront of your mind—not the challenges and obstacles that stand between you and your goal.  It’s easy to say, I want to earn $500 every month from my affiliate business, or $1,000 or $10,000.  But what if you translated that number into something really concrete—something tangible?

I want a new cell phone, and I want I want to make enough money through my affiliate marketing endeavours to pay for it.  I owe $10,000 for my school loan, and I want to pay it off in a year.  I want to take a trip around the world, and live in the lap of luxury, and not have to work a single day while I’m travelling.  Or maybe you want to promote products that you feel passionately about, or you want to demonstrate your expertise in a particular subject.

In my case, with my garden, it was my tomato sandwich.

And finally, this summer, I tried planting tomatoes again.  You better believe I was hesitant, plus I have two more kids than I did the last time around, and even less time to waste.  But you know what? Those tomatoes made it this time.  And damn they’re good.

Have a goal.  Keep it at the forefront of your mind.  And don’t let a few raccoons get in your way. 

What obstacles have you had to overcome? How did you do it? Let us know in the comments below.

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Me, My Tomato Sandwich and Affiliate Marketing

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In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, Benjamin Franklin famously said, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Even though you might not always be assured of conversions that lead to be commissions, what you can be sure of is that any money you earn as an affiliate is taxable income.  If you don’t declare this income, it’s entirely possible that, someday, somebody’s going to come knocking on your door wondering why you haven’t given the government its cut.

We’re not tax experts here at Share Results, but many of us have been involved in some kind of entrepreneurial enterprise in one form or another, and have had to deal with the resulting taxes. Here are a few points that have been assembled from members of our team to give affiliates a little bit of advice on how to handle taxes.

Remember that affiliate marketing is a business

Any time a person makes money through a business venture of any kind, it is incredibly important to declare that income at tax time. Even if it’s not enough to put you into another tax bracket, the best thing we can suggest is to always be honest with your government’s revenue agency.

The reason being is that affiliates often start out slow before they become successful. Once you start to earn enough money for the government to want its cut, it’s best to make sure that you have been honest all along, so that there are no discrepancies in your earnings.

Be prepared

Recognize that any income that you receive will be taxed. To avoid having to pay a lot of taxes all at once, it is a good practice to put some money aside as it comes in, so that you will be ready at tax time. Some people like to put these funds in a high-interest account, so that they’re earning a little bit of interest while waiting to use the money to pay for taxes.

Not doing so could result in you not being able to meet your tax obligations in a timely fashion, which could result in monetary penalties. Nobody wants to pay interest on tax money, so be sure to be prepared for the inevitable.

To know how much money you have earned from the Share Results program, simply log in to your affiliate account and navigate to the payment history section. You can produce a report here that will show you your income over a specific period of time, which will allow you to find out how much you earned over a specific calendar year. For more information, contact your affiliate manager, and they will be happy to go over everything that you need to know.

Read the Terms and Conditions

Every program or network handles taxes in a different way. In some states, there is an obligation for networks to deduct taxes from affiliate earnings, while in most others affiliates are payed directly and it is up to them to declare the income. It’s extremely important to read the Terms and Conditions of any program you belong to and make sure that you are aware of the tax laws in your state or province.

Reducing the obligation

Once your business starts to grow, you should look into ways that you can reduce your tax payout. Like any business, you can write off expenses, so be sure to save receipts that can be used to lessen your tax obligation. There are also other techniques that can be put it into effect, depending upon the size of your business. To find out what methods you might be able to employ, it’s best to refer your questions to someone who makes their living dealing with tax issues.

Talk to a tax professional

In order to be absolutely certain that you are handling your tax obligations correctly, the very best thing to do is to talk to a tax professional. A Chartered Personal Accountant (CPA) should have all of the answers that you are looking for, and can often advise you on the best ways to handle your business taxes. If possible, find out from other affiliates in your area if there is a CPA that they can recommend.

You may also be able to find out some information from your affiliate manager. If you are in a different country from a program that you belong to that is generating your income, you’ll want to find out what that is going to mean for your business.  The best way to find out is to refer your questions to a professional.

Once again, we are not tax professionals, but we do think that it is important that affiliates know that there is a responsibility to pay taxes on earnings, and to be prepared for that eventuality. With help from a professional accountant, or other tax professional, you’ll be able to find out the best way to ensure that you are paying your taxes properly, and keeping as much of that money as you can.

If you have any information on how you manage your taxes that you want to share with other affiliates, be sure to leave us a comment below. If you have links to places where affiliates can find out more information, feel free to leave those as well.

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Affiliates Business Tips | As Certain as Death and Taxes

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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’.

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MarketingSherpa Founder Anne Holland Talks Landing Pages and WhichTestWon.com

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There is an innocence and brutal honesty that my three-year old exudes every single day. And as much as I strive to instil my knowledge and experience on to her, she still manages to teach me so much.

Some of her words of wisdom, I’m somewhat less fond of, like: Mom, you have lines on your forehead, so I guess you must be getting old. I guess. Or: Mom, you should wear more pink, it makes you look more like a girl. I hate pink.

But most of the time, in her purity, in her determination to do things her way, she reminds me of the little things in life that I apply to my daily routine, and in turn, to my adventures in affiliate marketing.

Here then, are four tips from my daughter, which bring me back to basics, and make for great affiliate marketing lessons.

1. I want to be everything when I grow up
My girl says this regularly, and neither my husband nor I have the heart to break it to her, that she just might want to narrow down her focus—at least a little. And really, why should we.

Thinking big is essential to making it big, in life, as it is in affiliate marketing. Now, that doesn’t mean that when you’re starting out as an affiliate that you should launch endless websites, promote every single brand you come across and dip your fingers into PPC, SEO, blogging and social media all at the same time. It means you think big, and you want big, and then you come up with a plan to get you there. One step at a time, and patience, patience, patience.

2. When I wear a (pink) dress, I want it to twirl!
I have a hard time getting my girl in anything else but a dress—and skirts don’t count. And not just any dress; it has to be a dress that twirls when she dances and spins. Sometimes, in the craze of the early morning rush to get out the door, this demand can be difficult to meet. But then again, who can blame a girl who knows exactly what she wants.

Knowing what you want out of your affiliate business is paramount to reaching success. How else will you know when you’re there, if you don’t know what it is that you want? Once you’ve established what you want, tell the people around you, so they can help you make that happen. Your affiliate manager is a great person to start with. Maybe you want to know about all new promotions, new marketing creatives or new opportunities that fall within a specific sector. Having expectations is a good thing. Make sure you’re teaming up with the right people to help you meet those expectations.

3. That kid’s bad news
My daughter is in daycare and there are six other friends in her class. When I ask her how her day was, I ask her about her classmates, and if they had fun together that day. She’s not a big fan about one particular boy, and goes so far as to say that she doesn’t like playing with him. I know who he is, and sure enough, he spells trouble—and is often found in time-out because he’s done one bad thing or another.

In affiliate marketing, bad news often comes in the form of black hat SEO. Keyword stuffing, hidden text and page cloaking are just some of the many black hat SEO techniques that may seem like a fast-track to stardom, but in the end, can cost you your website and indeed, your business. And while you may experience a boost in traffic, this is usually only temporary. White hat SEO techniques will have a much more positive and long-term benefit for your website and will help you get to where you want to be in search engine results—and help you stay there.

4. But I like my old teacher…
My daughter’s daycare is divided into classrooms, which are divvied up based on age. Next September, she will be moving up to the 4-year-old level, and she’s a little hesitant about leaving her beloved Johanne, her teacher, behind. To prepare the children for this transition, her class has been spending about an hour every day in the big-kid class, and low and behold, she seems keener now for the move.

For many of us, and affiliates too, we have a routine that gives us comfort. Whether that be hanging with the same people or using the same familiar marketing techniques, humans are often creatures of habit, and that can act as a disservice to your affiliate marketing business.

Breaking out of your everyday routine may sound challenging, but it really is quite achievable. Just like my daughter, try doing something for an hour a day, that you have no experience in, that you’ve always wanted to find out more about—but never have. Attending conferences, for example, is a great way to meet new people, learn new techniques and be introduced to programs that you may never have thought about before. You’re not going to give up the methods that have proven fruitful for your business, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t add to them, and maybe discover something equally good, or better.

We’re continually inspired by wee ones. Check out one of our earlier posts called, All I Need to Know about Affiliate Marketing I Learned in Kindergarten.

How do your kids inspire you in affiliate marketing? Let us know in the Comments section below.

See the rest here:
What My Three-Year Old Teaches Me About Affiliate Marketing

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Love her or hate her, there is no doubt that Lady Gaga is one of the most successfully marketed celebrities of the last decade. And it just keeps getting better. She now has 10 million fans on her Facebook page, making her the living celebrity with the most fans (Michael Jackson still beats her by a cool—or is it a bad?—4.9 million fans). She was also the first artist to earn more than one billion views on YouTube. That’s right: One Billion.

So, how did she do it? Is Lady Gaga truly the most amazing thing since Al Gore invented the Internet? Is there that big of a market for singers who dress up in Kermit the Frog dresses? Or, is it that Lady Gaga has one of the most competent marketing machines behind her since Madonna carefully navigated a boat down a Venice canal using nothing but sheer will and some strategically placed bangles in the Like a Virgin video?

There is a lot more than one aspect behind the meteoric rise to fame of this American songstress, and affiliate marketers could take a lesson from her and her team of PR people. So, here are our five affiliate marketing lessons from Lady Gaga.

She’s unique
There is no doubt that Lady Gaga is one of a kind. While many might say she’s derivative, she seems to have carved out a niche for herself. I, for one, have never seen anyone else in a dress made of floppy Kermit the Frog dolls.

Affiliates need to find a way to offer something unique to people, something that they’re not going to get anywhere else. Give people a little something out of the ordinary and they won’t be able to look away.

She promotes constantly!
Images of Lady Gaga on the Internet, TV, magazines and newspapers have become as ubiquitous as shorts in summer. She is absolutely everywhere. Not every affiliate has the kind of team (or product) that can make that kind of invasion into popular culture, but the point is that it is necessary to get out there and promote whenever and wherever you can.

Bloggers do well by guest blogging on other sites, or by sharing links in strategic places. PPC ads are a great way for affiliates to get themselves out there, and well strategized and relevant comments on blogs can also help. And don’t ever forget our old friend, the email. Getting people to sign up for a newsletter that can be sent to them regularly so that you can keep reminding them of what you have to offer is a great way to keep yourself in the proverbial limelight.

Her songs are easy to remember
Another important aspect of Lady Gaga’s success is the people who write her songs. I’m quite sure that if I just said, “P-p-p-poker face,” there are at least a few people who would have that song stuck in their heads for a while.

So, how does an affiliate get someone to remember them? I’m not suggesting you write a song, but finding a way for people to remember who you are and what you do is a big part of marketing. Consider the following: Just do it; let your fingers do the walking; it takes a licking and keeps on ticking; the quicker picker-upper. I’ll bet you can associate each of those slogans with the company they represent.

A catchy name for your blog, a great tag-line, a quirky product line—all of these things will get your site’s song stuck in the heads of your visitors. Now it’s up to you to write the music.

Famous friends
Lady Gaga has done a good job of being seen in public with other famous people, and has even collaborated with many. How’d you like Beyonce to endorse your site? You might not be so keen, but that would surely bring you at least a few visitors. It also helps that she became BFFs with the Queen of All Media, gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who btw calls her his ‘wifey’.

Starting relationships with some of the bigger players in the affiliate marketing business is a great way to get your site known. Once again, guest blogging is a big one, and if you can get a mention on a popular site, that’s a big deal. You don’t have to get ambushed by paparazzi to be well known, but it certainly does help to have a few well-connected friends.

Be yourself
You won’t find another Lady Gaga, and nobody should be able to find another affiliate site that’s exactly like yours. Feel free to draw upon the influences of your favorite affiliate marketers, but remember that unless you are true to yourself, you may not enjoy what you’re doing enough to actually want to keep doing it. Be yourself and let your personality shine through. Besides, that is exactly the kind of honesty that people trust, and people’s trust is the first step towards conversions for affiliates.

Excerpt from:
Affiliate Marketing Lessons from Lady Gaga

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The rest is here:
Why Podcast – profit with your voice

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If you’re an affiliate and you don’t have a pass to Affiliate Summit East 2010 in NYC yet, the only question is, why not? This is one of the biggest and most anticipated events in the affiliate marketing business on a yearly basis, with a plethora of industry influencers, merchants and affiliates in attendance. In fact, this event is so popular that, three months before the event is to be held, the exhibitor’s booths are already sold out.

Affiliate Summit East 2010

Conferences like this are an absolute goldmine for affiliates. They offer the opportunity for face-to-face networking with merchants that you want to work with, or may already be working with. They also offer the chance to meet with other affiliates who can provide valuable information on how to increase your earning potential.

There are still tickets available for the Affiliate Summit East 2010, but why not let us hook you up with a Silver Pass for free? The Silver Pass will give you access to the Affiliate Meet Market and Exhibit Hall, where you’ll be able to meet all kinds of industry professionals and check out the merchant booths and find out about some of the industry’s leading programs. In addition, the Silver Pass gives you access to the Keynote addresses, and the Affiliate Summit Social Network.

How does one go about winning? It couldn’t be simpler.

We have reserved two tickets for a couple of eager affiliates who want to tell us about why they love affiliate marketing. Send us your submission to marketing@shareresults.com. You can send us a blog entry, a video, song, picture, or anything at all, so long as it’s creative. We’ll post the submissions on our blog and the winners will be decided by the most number of votes.

One ticket is being saved for an affiliate of the Share Results network who places one of our Share Results/Affiliate Summit banners on their website. We’ll choose a winner randomly from those affiliates who bring the most traffic to our blog.

If you’re not part of our network, you can still sign up to participate.

The winner s of the contest will be announced in late July. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get into the Affiliate Summit 2010 for absolutely FREE!

Originally posted here:
Got your Ticket to Affiliate Summit East 2010 Yet?

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Need two great more reasons to attend Affiliate Summit East 2010 in NYC? How about keynote speakers, Frank Luntz and Jim Kukral?

Ah, but you’ve never been before, and you’re not quite sure what to expect at one of the most talked-about affiliate marketing conferences of the year.  Solution: sign up at the Affiliate Summit Newcomer Program where you will be connected with Affiliate Summit veterans.

I know, I know… but the event is soooo far away.  Well, not really! The event is in August—and come May 1^st, Silver Passes will be going up to $249.  I don’t know about you, but free sounds so much better. 

If you haven’t entered our Share Results contest to get your free Silver Pass to Affiliate Summit East, now is great time!

Cathlyn Driscoll from Best Business Mastery wants to attend Affiliate Summit East—and she’s told us all about why she loves affiliate marketing.

Why Best Business Mastery Loves Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing equals Independence
Affiliate Marketing equals Leverage
Affiliate Marketing equals Intelligence
Affiliate Marketing equals Learning
Affiliate Marketing equals Important
Affiliate Marketing equals Licri causa

Show Cathlyn your support by voting on her entry—just click on the green arrow in the “Place your vote on this article” rectangle located below.  Next, try your luck with the contest, and tell our marketing team why you love affiliate marketing!

Related posts:

1. Win a Silver Pass to the Hottest Affiliate Marketing Event, Coming Up in NYC: Affiliate Summit East 2010
2. 50 Fabulous Reasons Why I Love, Live, Breathe, Eat, Drink Affiliate Marketing!
3. BAMroll Update: July 23, 2009

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Why Best Business Mastery Loves Affiliate Marketing

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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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Chetan Jariwala is the first to get his submission into our Share Results Contest, vying for his chance to win a Silver Pass to Affiliate Summit East 2010!

His entry comes all the way from India, where he is active with his affiliate website www.mottobiz.com.

He’s come up with 50 great reasons why he loves affiliate marketing—some of which are sure to give you a chuckle.

Show Chetan your support, and vote on his contest entry today!

ADDICTED TO BEING AN AFFILIATE

A- ATTAIN
F- FINANCIAL
F- FREEDOM
I-  In
L- LIFE
I-  INVENT & INNOVATE
A- AFFORDABLE
T- TECHNOLOGICAL
E- ENTERPRISE

If the above doesn’t sum up what it means to be an affiliate then strap on your seat belts & enjoy the rest of the ride!

50 Fabulous Reasons Why I Love-Live-Breathe-Eat-Drink- Affiliate Marketing…..

1. First & Foremost- You don’t need an office.  Well this is not entirely true- What I mean to say is that you can work right from the comfort of your home! Set aside a computer & pick your office space in any corner of your house.
2. My Bad, I forgot to mention that you can actually work from anywhere across the world.  The only prerequisite is that you have laptop & Internet connectivity.  Although I don’t recommend going to the Sahara desert to see if it works…
3. No more commuting long hours or carpool headaches anymore.  Just grab a quick latte & sip your way to work.
4. You don’t have to worry about sucking up to your boss and make him happy! You are your own boss! Get used to it….
5. I don’t have to create my own product to sell
6. You don’t need a warehouse to store the products you sell.  No need to keep tabs on the stock inventory.
7. Just pick a product that does well & dump everything else without losing a single penny. All you need to do is change the product links.. It doesn’t get any easier than this…
8. You can sell almost anything to customers but never have to deal with them.  Just Leave It to Beaver!
9. I don’t have to spend a dime on shipping products
10. I don’t need a huge investment to start things out
11. No more cold calling strangers or talking to obnoxious clients.
12. There will be no group meetings or other boring discussions.  As a matter of fact- The only discussion you will have is with yourself on how you can continue making more money.
13. Affiliate marketing is the only business in the world that can be operated from another location without incurring any overhead costs.  The only thing required to move is the person running it.
14. Unlike other business types, affiliate marketing is the only business which can track each and every visitor.  Just plug into your analytics & find out where your visitors are coming from… On top of it, you can find out just about everything else there is to know about his activity… repeat visits, browser type, average time spent & much more.  Now tell me if there is any other business that can historically track their customers like affiliates can? I don’t think so!
15. I can sleep well knowing that my business is open to visitors 24/7.  By the time I wake up, it’s made me more money before my day actually begins.  All of a sudden, it makes sense to have dreams during the night & realize them in the morning!
16. I can listen to loud ass music & still have a productive day. (take care not to disturb your neighbors)
17. Every day is a Sunday.  No need for manic Mondays…
18. My kids will never complain that- “Dad was never there for me”
19. Because I work @home, my wife literally forces me to get the hell out of the house. Well that’s just awesome, cuz I can hang out with my friends & have a beer without carrying a guilt trip.
20. Affiliate marketing has redefined the meaning of comfort & convenience for business minded people.  Back in the days, these words had no real value within a business model.
21. I get paid for bringing in like minded people (Referrals commission)
22. Affiliates also get paid for just showing other people’s business link!
23. I can set my own working hours
24. For Newbies- I don’t have to quit my regular job.  I can make it a part time business until I actually succeed.
25. I can save money by babysitting my own kids!
26. Thanks to affiliate marketing, social networking has become my past-time hobby money making machine.
27. I have real world followers/subscribers that actually listen to what I have to say.
28. Affiliates are not limited to sell products in a particular location.  They can promote products globally & have a worldwide reach.
29. I can retire a lot earlier than most people on this planet.
30. I don’t need someone else to motivate me.  I get motivated on a daily basis by checking my serp rankings!
31. In case you are not self-motivated, affiliate managers are just what the doctor ordered!  They are always there to support you & guide you.  Just make sure you don’t start crying on their shoulders.  Honorary mention-: Nicole Young
32. Affiliates get to showcase their talent (websites) to the best companies in the world (Google,Bing,Yahoo).  On top of it, it pays well to be on their top ten list.
33. I can take a nap in the middle of the day & act like it’s no big deal….
34. Affiliates can honestly say “I Love What I Do”, instead of just pretending it…
35. I don’t need any approvals from my boss.  Everything is approved as long as it makes money.
36. Besides grabbing a beer at a bar, there is only one other thing that inspires me to step out of the house:  affiliate conferences/seminars…. They are so much fun that it brings out the inner child in me! Basically it’s the best darn thing that happened since my college days.
37. Affiliate marketing can create an extra source of income for moms, college kids, senior citizens or anyone who is willing to learn.
38. There is no cost to join as an affiliate marketer.
39. Unlimited earning potential.  Skyz da limit…
40. Forget about hiring in-house employees & pay them big salaries.  Affiliates can outsource most of the work to virtual assistants through a pay for performance system.
41. Say goodbye to complicated contractual obligations with advertisers.
42. I can go on vacation & put the entire business on autopilot.
43. Unlike offline business, affiliate marketing offers the most advanced promotional resources. From analytics, research, promotion, conversion optimization (U name it!). There is never a shortage of tools, plus most of them are absolutely free of charge.
44. It’s a lot easier to replicate a successful online business than it is to duplicate an offline business… If you know what I mean!!!
45. If done right, you don’t have to spend a fortune on branding or advertising.
46. There are probably a gazillion ways (if not more) to advertise your business in front of customers.  Ok may be I am exaggerating a bit.
47. Becoming a successful affiliate requires hard work but the ROI is much faster as compared to offline business ventures.
48. The Affiliate industry symbolizes the power to achieve freedom without compromising your lifestyle.
49. Affiliate Marketing is the Weapon of Mass Monetization!
50. Last but not the least: – You don’t need super natural powers to be a Super Affiliate. Fortunately, persistence easily outweighs talent in this business (word on da street).

Related posts:

1. Print Magazines Use Affiliate Marketing
2. Stocking up for Back to School with Excel Toner and Love Toner
3. All I Need to Know about Affiliate Marketing I Learned in Kindergarten

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50 Fabulous Reasons Why I Love, Live, Breathe, Eat, Drink Affiliate Marketing!

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