Do you have a Christian business with an affiliate program? Would you like to have your program spotlighted in front of 75-100 top affiliate industry folks?

Are you a secular company that is looking to do business in the Christian niche?

The CAMA Cruise at Affiliate Summit East in Boston offers you a great chance to get in front of affiliate marketing industry performers for 2 hours of “captive audience” networking. Here’s what we’re doing:

The Christian Affiliate Marketing Association is sponsoring a 2 hour harbor cruise on Sunday morning August 10th. We’ll be leaving from the dock right outside the Seaport Hotel at 9:00 am and returning by 11:00 am.

Sponsors will have a banner link placed on the CAMA blog, will receive a write up in the event program, will be allowed to briefly address the crowd, and be able to distribute sample product and information.

Here’s what our Platinum Sponsor oneNetworkDirect had to say about why they are supporting the CAMA Cruise:

“OneNetworkDirect is excited to participate in the CAMA cruise. The cruise brings together thought leaders, away from the hustle and bustle of the Affiliate Summit exhibit hall, to enjoy a delicious brunch, industry conversations and networking opportunities. Our participation in the CAMA cruise is an important part of our commitment to bringing the best solutions to affiliate marketing.”

- Theresa Miller, Corporate Events Manager, Digital River, Inc.

Sponsor packages start at $500 - please contact me (Wade Tonkin) at 360.540.0730 if you are interested in sponsoring.

If you’d like to register, just click on the link below. Early registrants will save $10 on their tickets if they register by July 16th.

God Bless,

Wade

At Affiliate Summit West in February, I had the chance to sit down with Geno Prussakov, the owner of AMNavigator, an outsourced program management service, and author to chat on his new book “Online Marketing Through Consumer’s Eyes” that he has just released the day before.

Geno is also the guy behind “A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing” that I really enjoyed as well.

Geno and I spent some time together (thanks to oneNetwork Direct for supplying the hospitality suite where we did the interview) and chatted about the new book. We talked about how the idea came to be (his lovely wife inspired it) how his data was collected (over 2700 respondants returned surveys and average Joe’s and Jane’s were interviewed) and some of the findings in the book that he considered to be key. He also talks about 5 of the key findings that he thinks are compelling to affiliate marketers. One of my favorites deals with an issue that has been debated between affiliates, merchants and affiliate managers over the ages regarding the commission leaking potential of toll free customer services numbers posted on ecommerce sites.

87% of the survey respondents reported that they would complete their order through a shopping cart on a site even if a toll free number to call and order was provided

The book is a series of graphs and explanations of findings that are presented in super practical and easy to understand form. I was able to blast through the book in the first day of Affiliate Summit in my down time and I found it really useful. I agree with Geno in that this book would be a good read and desk top resource for anyone involved in ecommerce - from merchant to affiliate to consultant.

User experience is often overlooked and is critical to successful affiliate marketing and ecommerce.

You can pick up a copy today at Amazon.

NOTE: This is a video interview from the vaults of ChristianAffiliateMarketers.com. Because of the file size, it took me forever to get it live and I am sorry - it’s good stuff and I want to thank Geno for taking the time to chat with me.   He’s a good guy, a friend and a brother in Christ.

 

 CAM Blog Podcast # 11 - Memory Cross [14:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (97)


I sat down with Mike Vitamvas, Andy Lambert and Sandy Simpson and we talked about:

• The origins of MemoryCross
• Some of the major affiliations they have made (Billy Graham Ministries, etc)
• The prominent role of affiliate marketing in their online sales
• The details of their offer
• Their commitment to spreading the Gospel in all countries, including producing translations in a number of languages, as well as producing picture only versions.
• Their involvement in producing Vacation Bible School materials with a number of VBS publishers.
• Their commitment to putting product in the hands of affiliates to let them see what they are promoting.

The people behind MemoryCross.com are top notch folks with a heart for Evangelism. I heartily recommend that you check out their program. Here are some details:

• Software-based program - built into their cart
• Pays 10% commissions on sales on Tier 1 and 5% for Tier 2 sales
• $50 average order
• Affiliates often receive free product samples

If you would like to find out more about the MemoryCross affiliate program, please contact Sandy Simpson at sandy@memorycross.com or join now

I am super excited to announce that Gary Vaynerchuk will be joining me on the Podcast on June 23rd.

We’re going to be talking about “Passion” and how it pertains to building your business and how Gary has parleyed his passion for wine and his willingness to let that passion run wild on his video casts to build his business ten plus fold!

If you’d like to learn more about the incomparable “Gary Vee” check out his appearance on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch:

You can also check out Gary’s site at www.winelibrarytv.com

This is one podcast not to miss… if Gary’s passion doesn’t rub off on you… get your vital signs checked.

God Bless,

Wade

Last week, I spoke with longtime friend and partner in crime (not so much lately) Ian Larsen about content.

Ian was most recently the Director of Affiliate Relations at oneNetwork - the affiliate network operated by Digital River. He has recently moved into consulting and working on some affiliate side ventures and has been doing a lot of work lately on different methods for sourcing content for his web ventures.

Why the focus content? If you are going to make money on the web via affiliate marketing, CPA marketing, or increasingly, even paid search, you need to have content to draw viewers, engage them and add value to the conversation. Once the viewers are engaged they are more likely to interact positively with your advertisers and to come back to be marketed to again.

We talked about several ways of producing site or blog content:

• self generated - if you are an expert - write your own
• outsourced - this doesn’t mean stealing other peoples content - it means paying experts to write it for you
• user generated - let blog or site visitors provide reviews, etc.
• merchant generated - many merchants provide product info or reviews via a data feed

Ian spoke a bit about what he is doing on his site at www.cascadegear.com as well as some of the techniques and resources he is putting into play with the affiliates of his client Doba.com

 

 Ian Larsen on "Content" [25:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (70)


This call was a bit different in that we didn’t focus on the affiliate marketing business, or an affiliate program, but instead on a really worthwhile “God project” that a Christian brother in the affiliate industry is taking on.

I sat down late last week with Jamie Birch of Converseon and his friend (non affiliate industry) Dave Scammell to chat about a project called the 40 40 40 Project that Dave and Jamie are working on together. In the 40 40 40 Project, Dave is attempting to raise enough money to build 40 homes in warn torn- Burundi through a really awesome ministry focused on reconciliation between the two warring factions (Hutu’s and Tutsi’s) .

We had a great chat about the background of the conflict that has created the need for housing, the details of the reconciliation efforts, the cost of building a single home ($1000 USD) and how Dave became convicted to help with this effort and subsequently how Jamie became involved in the effort. We also chatted a bit about how CAM Blog followers can help.

The challenge is to raise $40,000 in 40 days ending on June 22nd. Jamie has committed to raising $5000 towards the effort and we’d like to be a part of this. If you’d like to help Jamie meet his goal, please visit his site at http://jamiebirch.com/fortyhomes.html

Jamie has been a friend in the business for a long time and has been actively involved in youth ministry before the birth of his last 2 kids - I am happy to help with this effort and I hope you will too.

God Bless,

Wade

 

 CAM Blog Podcast #9 with Jamie and Dave on 40 40 40 Project [21:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (63)

A couple of weeks back I chatted with Andy Beal on the CAM Blog Podcast and we talked about his new tool Trackur, a really affordable and easy to use reputation monitoring solution. He mentioned at the time that he was launching an affiliate program, but there were still some kinks to iron out. I just spoke with him and it looks like the affiliate program for Trackur is launched and ready for some promoters.

I’ve been having a great time with my copy of Trackur over the last few weeks using it in some different ways that I think are useful to affiliate managers, online merchants and affiliates. Here’s what I suggest:

Affiliates - use Trackur to monitor your most popular exclusive coupon codes

Merchants - use Trackur to monitor trademark compliance, coupon use, and the “buzz on the street” around your company.

Affiliate Managers - use Trackur to monitor keyword compliance and coupon usage. Also point Trackur at your competitors keywords or brand names to see who is talking about them - then add them to your prospect list.

For me the most powerful aspects of the Trackur solution are it’s pricing and ease of use. It is just super easy to initiate and refine a search to the point where you will get useful data, then update that information as frequently as needed.

Trackur Affiliate Program Details:

• Payout - 35% on all payments (initial and monthly recurring)
• Payment Threshold - $100 or more in commissions owed
• 90 Day cookie length
• First affiliate referring visitor gets the sale

Please click here to find out more or sign up for the Trackur Affiliate Program

I’m excited to announce that tomorrow (5/29) I am going to have the chance to sit down with John Marshall of EpiscopalBookstore.com to chat about the growing trend of states requiring online retailers to collect sales tax from shoppers. Coming July 1, 2008, this will be required of all online resellers in Washington State.

Taxation of online retailers has become a lightening rod issue with recent legal action pitting Amazon against the State of New York - with New York asserting that Amazon’s use of affiliates operating in New York (where Amazon has no offices, warehouses, etc) constitutes “Nexus” or effectively a corporate presence in state. New York argues that this entitles them to charge sales tax on Amazon transactions despite the fact that Amazon is Seattle WA based. For more coverage of this issue, I recommend following the story on the 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blog - Linda Buquet has done an awesome job of info gathering on this.

This case has caused many merchants to react (over react) and fire all of their New York based affiliates to insulate themselves from this potential issue, and affiliates that are New York based to look into incorporating and doing business from New Jersey to exempt themselves from being dropped by merchants and networks fearful of a heavy tax bill.

I’ll speak with John on the Washington specific issues (this is messy) as well as what he knows about the nationwide movement of states to aggressively pursue sales tax from online retailers. Washington is a particular mess for this as many counties and towns/cities, etc also attach their own fractions of percentages points to the state sales tax to finance projects and the state appears to be basing the sales tax that needs to be gathered on the location of the buyer.

My conversation is at noon PT and I will try to have this edited and up by 3:00 pm PT

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I am curious to see what everyone else out the encountered. Thanks to all of you and my link partners, we took a positive bump back to our all time high of 6/10.

Traffic is at an all time high as well. Thanks for all of your support.

God Bless,

Wade

I took some time last week to sit down with Anik Singal of Blog Classroom on Skype and chat a bit their launch that happened about an hour ago

As you can see in my previous post, I am pretty excited about the potential that Blog Classroom has in the affiliate space, and the Christian affiliate marketing realm as well. I think that blogs are an awesome platform for getting started in the affiliate business because they are easy for a non technical person to get into and they offer some distinct advantages in terms of Search Engine Optimization over building a site from scratch in HTML etc.

Enjoy the audio!

 

 Part 1 of PodCast focusing on impending launch of Blog Classroom [4:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (48)

 

 Part 2 of PodCast focusing on impending launch of Blog Classroom [4:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (43)