Web Hostgods

Archive for May, 2005

Thinking of Buying Affiliate Summit Passes on eBay? Caveat Emptor!

Posted by admin On May - 31 - 2005

After the Affiliate Summit 2005 conference sold out a couple of weeks back, the black market for conference passes started up.

As the wait list for passes swelled beyond 150 people, a number of auctions popped up on eBay where single passes to Affiliate Summit 2005 went for up to $2000 each.

And then the snakes came slithering in. I’ve been contacted by a number of people who bid, but didn’t win the auctions. It seems they were contacted by individuals who posed as the person running the auction.

They were mailed what amounted to phishing scam emails that copied the look of emails from eBay and telling the unsuspecting bidders that the winner of the auction decided not to buy, so the ticket was still available.

For anybody that is trying to buy an Affiliate Summit registration via online auctions or other methods, please contact us to verify that the seller is reputable.

Every registered person has a confirmation number - ask them for it, and we’ll check it against our database.

Affiliate News

Great Expectations in Affiliate Marketing

Posted by admin On May - 31 - 2005

The following is what Dave Trenck of had to say in response the the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved?

What’s wrong with affiliate marketing today is individual expectations. You’ll see on the affiliate message boards posts like “No sales in days” or “I only make half as much as I used to”.

Typically they’ll then end up blaming the affiliate program, the affiliate manager, or the network. These affiliates should start by looking at themselves.

How are they different than the 1,000s of other affiliates pushing the same products? What are they doing both online and offline to drive more traffic to their sites on a daily basis?

The answer, is typically nothing. These affiliates can improve by differentiating themselves, being strategic in the decision they make with who they partner with and how they promote them, and constantly seek out new avenues of traffic.

Affiliate Opinions

Three Points for Affiliate Program Excellence

Posted by admin On May - 30 - 2005

The following is what Craig Danuloff of The Pre-Commerce Group had to say in response the the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved?

Far too many affiliates don’t add any real value – they have ugly sites without significant content – and just exist to get their commission because they managed to jump in front of the transaction via SEO/SEM skill, luck, or some other niche targeting or marketing method. This obviously isn’t true of all affiliates, there are excellent affiliates who truly add-value and/or have a real existing client-base that they’re rightfully getting paid to introduce to the merchant. But the garish / no-value-add affiliates outnumber the other 10:1 or more, and they bring the image of the whole business down in the eyes of marketers and customers.
Most merchants don’t give affiliates enough tools and information to do a good job merchandising their products or adding value. They run programs assuming that all affiliates are just going to slap up the (often badly designed) banner ads – thereby encouraging the type of affiliates described above. Investing in richer content to share with affiliates, better creative, and advanced tools like web services needs to become the baseline, and more merchants (and affiliate networks who can afford to invest in these tools) need to go beyond the baseline.
Neither side really treats it like a sales channel. If merchants thought of their affiliates as part of their sales team the quantity and frequency of information flowing out of the company would increase by 3-5x. They would communicate positioning, competitive issues, and work to educate their sales team on both what they’re selling and how to sell it. If affiliates acted more like members of the sales team they’d work to fully communicate the positioning of the products they represent, hit their marks in terms of when promotions were supposed to stop and end, find a way to add value for their prospects and to gather feedback that the merchant could use to improve the products or the business. Elements of all these behaviors exist here and there in the affiliate world, but by-and-large the relationships feel a lot more like advertiser-publishers (you distribute that and if anyone clicks on it I’ll pay you.)

Despite all of the above, affiliate marketing works to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This means it is a good business for just about everybody, and despite the comments above I believe anyone sending traffic is earning their commissions and providing great value to their merchants.

But imagine how large the affiliate market would be, and how much respect it would have in the larger world of marketing, if most affiliates added real value to their customers (beyond pointing them to the merchants), if merchants enabled affiliates to really promote and fully merchandise their products, and if affiliates were treated like star salespeople, and acted like stakeholders in the businesses they represent.

The affiliate market would quickly grow to many times its current size in terms of both dollars and respect.

Affiliate Opinions

Is Affiliate Marketing Ready for GoldenCAN?

Posted by admin On May - 29 - 2005

I recently chatted with a gentleman named Asif Malik who has released a new affiliate tool called GoldenCAN.

The premise of GoldenCAN is that sites with high traffic volume can easily add GoldenCAN Store Integration or GoldenCAN Coupon Integration to their site with just one line of code.

The result is that the site then displays millions of products, and thousands of coupons and promotions.

But there’s a catch that has some affiliates skeptical about the service. While there is no setup or ongoing service fee, Asif generated revenue from this technology with what he terms a shared link program.

According to the site, “Every 4th click on a store from your website will be replaced with GoldenCAN’s affiliate id. This means that 75% of click through traffic from a specific store on your website will contain your affiliate id and 25% will contain GoldenCAN’s affiliate id.”

Surely the service must generate money to cover the development and maintenance, but some affiliates have expressed concern over the potential that more than every 4th click would be attributed to GoldenCAN.

Participating merchants include Amazon.com, Boscov’s, eBags, and TigerDirect. As far as commissions for sites working with GoldenCAN, they are issued directly by the merchants to the affiliates.

I think this is a concept to keep an eye on. It may be a bit of a hard sell for the weathered veterans, but for those affiliates that reside on the wrong end of the 80/20 rule, this could be a breakthrough.

Affiliate Marketing Article

Take Things Offline and Gain Trust in Affiliate Marketing

Posted by admin On May - 28 - 2005

The following is what Mike Allen of Shopping-Bargains.com had to say in response the the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved?

Affiliate Marketing is a powerful tool that creates a win-win situation for online merchants and webmasters. However, with most good things, there are some potential problems if relationships are not handled prudently.

These potential problems do not doom Affiliate Marketing to failure but do require a little extra dedication and attention to overcome.

Perhaps the largest potential problem of affiliate marketing is caused in part by the remote nature of the affiliate marketing relationship between merchant and webmaster.

Remote or distant relationships inevitably require trust. While figures don’t lie, liars do figure. The affiliate marketing system performs only as well as the depth of trust that exists.

One solution to this dilemma is to have regional and national affiliate marketing trade events and conferences to enhance the level of education and interaction between merchants and affiliate webmasters.

People who have a personal relationship tend to be more honest with each other. They also tend to work harder for each other. The benefits of a real relationship far outweigh a faceless ID on a spreadsheet or in a database.

The educational benefits of such events are also many. Merchants can learn about tools to enhance their fraud detection and prevention arsenal, strategies to more effectively recruit and retain affiliates, and ways to better motivate and reward existing affiliates.

Affiliated webmasters can learn new uses for the datafeeds and other tools provided by merchants, industry-best strategies for ad placement and landing page design, and other ways to enhance their click conversion rates.

Educational and social events of this kind reinforce the win-win relationship that is essential in an Affiliate Marketing program.

Plus it’s nice to every once in a while to be around people who understand what you do for a living and take you seriously! Hey, did I mention that it makes a pretty good tax deduction as well?

Affiliate Opinions

Affiliate Summit Triangle of Death

Posted by admin On May - 26 - 2005

Things are heating up in the CPA soap opera that is the lawsuit between ThinkPartnership and Direct Response Technologies.

On the heels of a May 17 press release from Direct Response, they are now trafficking an ad that touts DirectTrack as being “So Good, Our Leading Competitor Uses It.”

For clarification sakes, the “leading competitor” is KowaBunga! Technologies, and the user of the DirectTrack technology is PrimaryAds. Both are Think Partnership companies.

Todd Farmer, CEO of KowaBunga, responded to the ad and press release via his corporate blog:

We’ve been asked to comment on the situation with PrimaryAds and our competitor but we will not at this time. We will continue to create software and services that lead the market. Our integrity as a company speaks for itself, therefore, we don’t need an ad campaign or press release to prove otherwise.

Now this is hardly the East Coast vs. West Coast rap wars, but it’s sort of a geek’s equivalent.

Anyhow, in just a couple of weeks, the three companies at the center of this whole beef are running booths at Affiliate Summit 2005.

The intimate settings (only fifteen booths) will bring all of the players into close quarters for two days with Direct Response (booth 2), KowaBunga (booth 14), and PrimaryAds (booth 9) composing a sort of triangle of death on the exhibit floor.

General Affiliate Information

Affiliate Marketing Needs to Clean House to Move Forward

Posted by admin On May - 25 - 2005

The following is what Brian Appel of CPAffiliates.com had to say in response the the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved?

The problem with affiliate marketing is that there is too many seemingly scammy campaigns and fraudulent affiliates.

Everyone is looking for the quick buck. Every lame free iPod, free Plasma TV, get rich quick, Burger King v. McDonalds campaign that is out there just begs for fraudulent affiliates to soak up the cash, because it is way too easy to get into programs and start falsifying leads and clicks.

If we could get affiliate marketing to the point where it is just legitimate merchants selling quality products, then I think sales could increase across the board, because sites wouldn’t be so leary about taking on CPA campaigns.

We could finally have the core of affiliate marketing back, because it is simply one person referring another person to a company and being compensated for doing so.

Affiliate Opinions