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The Orange County Register recently published an affiliate marketing overview, “Online bargain sites fueled by retailers.”

Affiliate programs, in Internet time, have been around forever – dating back to the mid-1990s when I had to define the word ‘Internet’ in my stories. Back then, ordinary people could make a living off affiliate programs. And with a minimal number of consumers shopping online, online stores needed the extra promotion.

But the whole industry has changed, said Ronald Bell, founder of the semi-annual gathering Affiliate Summit.

“Everything was prehistoric. You couldn’t log in to see your sales. It was done by e-mail. There wasn’t all the linking options,” said Bell, who joined Amazon’s affiliate program in 1997. “Back then, it was pretty common for people to be satisfied to make enough money to cover their Internet bill, making $20 to $40 a month. Today, there’s a whole breed of super-affiliates who are making six figures or more.”

Read the complete article at http://www.ocregister.com/articles/affiliate-affiliates-deal-2035092-programs-many.

The September 2007 issue of Internet Retailer has an article on the argument of whether an affiliate program should focus on quality or quantity of affiliates.

In a world where bigger often is viewed as better, some online marketers have taken this approach to populating their affiliate marketing programs. If they know they’ll pay no commission fee to an affiliate unless a click-through from that affiliate’s site actually produces a sale, what’s the harm, the rationale goes, in signing up as many affiliates as possible?

The answer to that question isn’t as obvious as it may seem. Some experts say keeping an affiliate program wide open is a strategy that’s riskier than, and at the very least not as rewarding as, limiting and defining affiliates in a retailer’s program.

Read the complete article at http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=23602 for perspectives on both sides, including my own in favor of smaller affiliate programs.

The August issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine is now available and the focus this month is forgotten methods of generating traffic.

This issue touches on how offline advertising has a hidden goldmine of traffic and eager buyers; where to find this type of advertising; how to set up your offline campaign; and how to get print, radio or television advertising for far less than others are paying.

Another article covers how ezine advertising is effective, and which style ezine will get you not only visitors, but the visitors that are ready to buy.

“The Goodbye Page” will help you capitalize on your visitors’ impulse buying instinct as they try to leave your site. According to Affiliate Classroom, this technique will double your chances of making a sale, and it gives you another opportunity for an upsell.

Finally, there is a tip about a site that most people know about it, but apparently they are not using it. You can advertise for free on this site, which gets over 5 billion page views per month and ranks #34 among the most-visited websites in the world.

Check out the new issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.

I had a chat recently with the folks at Practical eCommerce magazine about the prospect of merchants utilizing their transaction confirmation page to run affiliate offers.

I’ve seen some merchants include affiliate offers on the main part of the site, which is certainly not going to make them popular with affiliates, however, I don’t see it as a taboo after the transaction.

After all, there is no threat in cannibalizing the affiliate referral at that point.

If it did become a point of contention, a resourceful merchant could always try working the affiliate IDs into their confirmation page links as sub-IDs.

Read the article at http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/476/Earn-Affiliate-Commissions/

Kerri Pollard, vice president of client performance at Commission Junction was interviewed about issues and trends in affiliate marketing in the March 2007 issue of OMMA, the Magazine of Online Media, Marketing & Advertising.

OMMA’s Lynne Russo Whylly asked Kerri about the benefits of affiliate marketing, how the industry has evolved, challenges, best practices, and where affiliate marketing is headed five years from now.

Read the article, “Performance Anxiety: Affiliate Marketing Adds Value As Lead Generation Grows More Complex.”

Kate Kaye has written an article at ClickZ on how recent legislation may result in a migration of gaming affiliates to mainstream (i.e. insurance, financing, dating) affiliate programs. As far as I’m concerned, the more, the merrier.

Affiliate marketing drives the online gambling space. Now that the industry is dealing with recent legislation outlawing U.S. Web gambling transactions, some gambling affiliates are searching for new markets to sink their teeth into. As a result, some say mainstream affiliate marketers are in for a rude awakening.

“I am extremely worried about this ban that Congress will put on online gaming,” wrote an affiliate webmaster in a post to the Gambling Portal Webmasters Association forum earlier this month. “We now have to turn our attention to the European market but one can only do so little marketing in Europe!” continued the concerned affiliate under the Net nom de plume Tropics.

“A lot of affiliates are going to bail,” said Marc Lesnick, operator of the Casino Affiliate Convention conference series. “They want to create their own niche markets,” he added, suggesting segments such as men’s dress shirts.

Continued at http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623671

In late 2003 it seemed a perfect storm had swelled against the use of e-mail in affiliate marketing. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, signed into law by President Bush on December 16, 2003, made legitimate e-mail affiliates wary of clicking the “send” button.

In addition to challenges like getting white listed by ISPs and beating Spam filters to reach their double opt-in subscribers, affiliates utilizing e-mail now had to lose sleep over whether they might run afoul of the FTC’s ambiguous e-mail regulations.

At the same time, industry pundits lined up to anoint RSS the heir apparent to e-mail. RSS, an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, enables people to subscribe to receive communications to an “RSS feed reader”. It sounded good on paper and pixels – subscribers get only what they want with RSS.

Could this be the end of e-mail as an affiliate marketing tool?

Continued at http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/e-mail-marketing/38225.html