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There are a handful of events taking place in January 2007 for affiliate marketers.

The Affiliate Managers Best Practices Meeting in Orange County will be held at Friday, January 12, 2007, 3pm at Smarthome.

The address is 16542 Millikan Avenue, Irvine, CA 92606 (cross streets Jamboree and Barranca). Anyone interested in attending this free event should e-mail lmann@smarthome.com.

There are also a few other get togethers in January for affiliate marketers.

The Asian Affiliate Marketing Conference/Dinner II takes place on Wednesday, January 17. Get more details and RSVP.

Then there is the Las Vegas Affiliate Dinner on the eve of Affiliate Summit. The dinner is on Saturday, January 20 and spots can be booked at the Affiliate Dinner site.

The month closes out with the Boston Affiliate Marketing Roundtable on Thursday, January 25.

Roundtable is a group of affiliate managers and affiliates that meet in a monthly roundtable open discussion to share tips, strategies and develop long term partnership with in the Boston affiliate marketing community.

More information at http://seo.meetup.com/50/calendar/5234511/.

What is the best way for an affiliate to sell a product without using Google AdWords or e-mail marketing?

Different types of marketing work best for different types of product leads. In other words, what works well to promote one vertical in affiliate marketing may not work well in others.

Also, it depends on whether you are looking to make a quick hit or intent on building a sustainable business.

There are lots of ways to approach product sales as an affiliate. You could run a coupon/rebate site, reward/loyalty site, comparison shopping site, content site, data feed site, etc.

You could also move into the realm of Web 2.0 and do some things with blogs, RSS, social networks, wikis, video, podcasts,etc.

Personally, I would encourage you to sit down, write a business plan, and work on a site with a long term vision. Come up with a unique value proposition and test out all sorts of methods with different affiliate programs to determine what works best for you.

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Got an affiliate marketing question? Ask it anonymously at http://www.askshawncollins.com/ and I’ll answer it for you in the AffiliateTip.com blog. Read the Ask Ronald Bell archives.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for affiliates. Christmas 2006 is in the books and it was the best year ever for E-Commerce.

Online retail saw $23.11 billion in holiday sales this year, which represents a 26 percent increase over 2005, according to data released by comScore Networks.

comScore also reported that in the five weekdays leading up to Christmas (12/18 – 12/22), consumer online non-travel (retail) spending was up 38% from last year.

E-Commerce also increased by 24% during the rest of 2006 over the previous year. Internet retail sales from January to October increased from $62.6 billion in 2005 to $77.5 billion this year, according to comScore.

“That online retail consumer spending for the year-to-date has surpassed the $100 billion mark is a testament to the continued growth and strength of the online marketplace,” commented Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks.

The top retail Web sites, ranked by dollars spent (excluding auction sites, large corporate purchases and travel) for the 2006 holiday season (Nov. 1 – Dec. 26) were as follows, according to comScore Networks:

1. Amazon.com

2. Dell.com
3. Yahoo.com
4. Walmart.com
5. Ticketmaster.com
6. JCPenney.com
7. Apple.com
8. Bestbuy.com
9. Victoriassecret.com
10. Circuitcity.com

So affiliate programs are all over the list of top retail sites.

That fact, combined with the impressive year over year growth in sales, should confirm to anybody that there are lots of opportunities, even for newcomers, in affiliate marketing.

Here’s to shattering the sales records again in 2007!

I recently sat down for a chat with Holly Preuss, Principal of Granular Solutions, and asked a bunch of questions about the state of search engine marketing.

Holly has been a leader in Internet marketing and technology for nearly a decade. She began her Internet career in 1998 at QVC managing QVC.com. In 1999, she joined Grey Advertising, first as a member of the KPE division, where she helped launch www.beauty.com and then with Grey Direct where she managed the online creative production team.

In 2001, Holly joined L’Oreal, where she led the launch of many of their beauty sites. In 2004, she moved to the Seattle area to work with Amazon.com’s business development team. Leveraging her broad base of experience in the online marketing arena, Holly then joined Barnes & Noble.com where she led their affiliate network, search engine marketing team and shopping comparison site relationships.

In 2006, Holly launched Granular Solutions and currently manages search for clients in the retail ecommerce world and for other more specialized businesses such as spas, multimedia production companies, as well as television program promotion sites.

I asked Holly the following questions…

1. What do you think about social tagging and the impact on SERPs (search engine results pages)?

2. Could you just give a ground level view of what social tagging is all about?
3. What are some of your strategies and tips for managing your reputation online?
4. Would you say that you try to control the first five results, maybe the first ten?
5. Do you have any thoughts on the recent announcement by the FTC about regulations around word of mouth marketing and how there should be disclosures if somebody is getting paid in any way?
6. What do you think about the difference between Search 2.0 versus traditional search, and whether or not that would be a threat to Google?
7. Do you have any favorite blogs that you generally go to or any resources you’d be willing to share?

You can read the transcript at http://www.affiliatetip.com/holly-preuss.pdf.

Audio of the interview was broadcast on the Affiliate Thing show. Download or stream it at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/affiliate-thing.

There has been a lot of discussion lately at Sam Harrelson’s Cost Per News blog about whether and how affiliates can leverage Web 2.0 to generate transactions.

One of the recent discussions was titled, “Can YouTube Work With Affiliate Marketing?“, and I’ve got an answer for that one.

I came across a site, currently in Beta, called BubblePLY.com which enables affiliates and anybody else to easily make creative additions to any online video.

BubblePLY employs technology where a transparent layer, known as a “PLY” is created. This PLY is placed on top of a video, and according to PLYmedia, the company that developed BubblePLY, this does not infringe upon the original content owner’s rights as their video is never altered, edited nor copied.

On this layer, you can add “Bubbles” like the kind in comic strips. They give the option of inserting speech, thought or commentary captions, and any of these bubbles can include comments, links and other effects. There are plans to add pictures and sounds soon.

Anyhow, BubblePLY works with videos from over a dozen sites, including YouTube, MySpace and Google Video.

I threw together an example of how an affiliate could leverage BubblePLY and YouTube in a matter of five minutes.

I inserted the URL for a video from French Maid TV on how to register a domain at GoDaddy.com and inserted links to GoDaddy.com in a number of places in the video.

According to Ilan Leibovich of BubblePLY, they don’t intend to be a community. Rather, they are focusing on being a tool that can be easily used in other sites.

So the affiliate can use sites like YouTube as content providers and then feature the video on their own site.

In addition to using videos on the various video sites, I think there are a lot of other interesting ways for affiliates to work with BubblePLY. For instance, they could purchase some royalty free stock footage and funny it up with bubbles - all the while tying it into whatever product or service they are promoting.

The fourth Affiliate Thing podcast is now available to stream or download.

The latest show, hosted by Lisa Picarille, Editor-in-Chief of Revenue Magazine, and myself, featured a discussion on the busiest online shopping days for Christmas.

We also had an interview with Holly Preuss, Principal of Granular Solutions on social tagging, Search 2.0 and more.

Some other topics of the day were Scott Jangro’s Affiliate Blog List, dates for the summer Affiliate Summit, New Year’s Resolutions, and the series on Web 2.0 from Sam Harrelson with exchanges on affiliates leveraging YouTube, Twitter, etc.

Download the latest show.

You can subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/AffiliateThing, or if you’d rather receive Affiliate Thing updates via e-mail, just send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com.

Tune in every Wednesday at noon EST at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/affiliate-thing for thirty minutes of affiliate marketing and fun.

Last thing - Affiliate Thing is now on MySpace. Go to http://www.myspace.com/affiliatething and add us as a friend.

The dates are set for Affiliate Summit 2007 East - July 8-10 in Miami.

The conference will be taking place at the InterContinental Miami Hotel overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami, FL.

Registrations will open in January 2007 and there will be an extra low registration rate available ONLY during Affiliate Summit 2007 West. That’s January 21-23, 2007 for the super early bird discount rate.

More details coming soon at http://www.affiliatesummit.com.