Whenever I speak with new clients about affiliate marketing, the topic of blogging usually comes up (my fault most of the time.)

Many clients or prospects mention that they are worried about blogging because of users having the ability to comment on their posts and potentially post damaging or negative things.   They want to make sure that they can get rid of the negative comments if they want to to protect their company’s reputation.

Wrong.. I tell them.   The key is not that you have a negative comment posted on your blog, it’s how you deal with it.  If you leave the comment up and respond in a positive and constructive way, thanking the poster for their feedback and working to get to the bottom of their issue, you can turn around the situation.  Best of all,  you can do it in front of your blog’s entire audience and likely in front of Google and it’s searchers.

“But what if the person is an unreasonable jerk who won’t be helped?”

Well then… most likely, they will be seen for what they are.

Your blog is another medium for you to have conversations with your customers and prospects.  Embrace it and you will reap the benefits.

Web 2.0  (and beyond) is all about conversations.  Don’t miss out on your chance to connect with your prospects and customers through the blogosphere.

God Bless,

Wade

Shawn Collins just addressed one of the sticky questions in our business over on his blog at AffiliateTip.com - He handles the question of what a merchant should do when they are successful with paid search and are launching an affiliate program. Should affiliates be allowed to bid on search terms? Which ones whould they be allowed to bid on if at all? How can you address this issue in your program’s affiliate agreement? What should you do if you catch affiliates violating the policy? It’s all in this video.

How you go about this really depends a lot on what your budget is and how well you have branded your site. The breakdown I generally see is this. Big companies who have been around for years and spent a ton of cash to build a brand generally want affiliates to keep away from their trademarked terms (company name, product names) and keep their bidding on more general terms and long tail terms. Merchants with less legacy and budget invested in Paid Search need the help getting coverage verses their competitors. So in this case, the strategy may be more along the lines of - go ahead and bid on my terms, but don’t run my cost up - let’s keep some of my competitors out of the top 10 listings.

I’ve even seen merchants with no budget or experience in PPC give free reign to affiliates and even suggest the terms to bid on.

The bottom line is that in many cases, the affiliates doing PPC arbitrage may be a lot smarter when it comes to working Paid Search for dollars than the merchant. They are good at knowing what words and terms generate revenue as opposed to just traffic and are great at optimizing their spend accordingly.

Give it some thought and come up with the solution that is right for your business.

I finally had the chance to read a book that I was hoping to read on the way home from Affiliate Summit West 2007.

A Practical Guide To Affiliate Marketing by Geno Prussakov (aff link) was everything that it promised to be in it’s title and I recommend it to any affiliate manager who is currently working in the business, as well as anyone who is looking to jump into the industry as a manager. Most importantly, I recommend it to any merchant who is thinking of launching an affiliate program as Geno’s book really effectively walks through all the steps involved in launching a successful affiliate program and managing it to it’s potential.

All phases of launching and managing a program are covered from how to evaluate your readiness to launch a program, selecting a network or software platform, how to structure your initial offer as well as scam proof and motivational incentive programs, and setting up and distributing datafeeds for catalog retail programs.

I personally found the most useful content to be the last 5 chapters of the book:

• Affiliate Manager and Merchant Mistakes
• Mistakes made within the Affiliate Program
• Mistakes made within the website that runs an Affiliate Program
• Ideas for Affiliate Program Promotion

Geno also includes an Appendix featuring an Internet Marketing Acronyms and Abbreviations Glossary. it’s perfect for newbies to the business who don’t yet speak the “Lingo”

Geno is really bright, well educated (Cambridge) guy who is a leader in the business and a Brother in Christ as well.

There is way more to this book than I can describe here, so I recommend that you pick up a copy and read it, then keep it handy for reference.

Order your copy now (aff link) for $18.95 ( I think it’s well worth it. )
God Bless,

Wade Tonkin