LinkedTube – awesome affiliate tool

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Linda Buquet for pointing this one out.  It’s a good one.

Have you always wanted to harness the power of video on your site?   It’s easy to do now using LinkedTube – you can create video creatives using existing YouTube videos and the links and copy of your choice.   Here’s a sample of a Greg Laurie video ad I created using my Shareasale affiliate link and an excerpt from Greg Laurie’s documentary “Lost Boy”

For more info including a sample demo video and a form you can use to create your own LinkedTube video ad – check out LinkedTube.com

God Bless,

Wade

Little things merchants do that drive affiliates crazy

Trust is one of the key components to a successful affiliate/merchant relationship.  The affiliate is dependant on the merchants tracking to work correctly and track and report all orders that the affiliate is responsible for.  As a merchant – if your tracking and reporting is faulty, you can really torpedo your program or hinder it’s growth in a hurry.    I wanted to point out a pitfall that I have noticed in a number of the programs I have worked with over the years to help merchants avoid endangering their affiliate relationships.  It’s a two words phrase that has caused many affiliates (and me) to mutter some four letter words: Test Orders

Here’s what happens:

• Merchant sees a great affiliate site that has their link live and clicks on the link to make sure all is working – in the process, the merchant’s machine is cookied to the affiliate.
• The merchant then places a test order (with the cookie belonging to the affiliate in question still live)
• The test is successful – and the sale is credited to the affiliate
• The affiliate then receives a notification email or notices a sale in their reporting interface and gets psyched… after all… they just made some money right ?
• The merchant then notifies their affiliate manager that the order for affiliate 1234 was actally a test order and asks the affiliate manager to clean up the mess.
• The affiliate manager slams their head on their desk, muttering under their breath… then educates the merchant on why this isn’t “okay”
• The affiliate sees the order cancelled – with a note saying “test order” and wonders what kind of goofballs they are working with.  Then- they call the affiliate manager  and asks “what kind of goofballs am I working with? “
• Affiliate Manager slams his head into his desk again and apologizes profusely to the affiliate and again mutters under his breath.

The other scenario here is even worse.  It involves the online marketing manager on the Merchant side sending out an internal email or chat telling everyone to check out the cool placement on the affiliate site.  At which point, the phone sales/customer service department (yep – the whole department) clicks on the link to see what it does and they ALL get cookied to the affiliate.   From then until the affiliate manager and the marketing manager have an end of month chat at which time the affiliate manager is informed that 100 of the 200 orders they placed that money are actually phone orders that didn’t come from affiliate traffic,  a TON of sales are tagged to affiliates.

The process of head bashing, muttering, open cussing out, and affiliate loss of trust in the merchant continue.  The affiliate (usually a top one) quits the program because their trust is completely blown.  It may have been an honest and innocent mistake, but both sides pay the price here.

Break the cycle here ….  please.

Please don’t click affiliate links if you are the merchant.  It will come back to bite you.  If you MUST place a test order, please clear your cookies first, or sign up for the program, get your OWN affiliate link and use that.  Then, any accidental orders will be credited to a dummy account and will cause no damage.

God Bless and happy selling.

How to Get Approved by an Affiliate Network

My friend The Real Tim Jones from Florida had a great post today on his blog that tackled the issue of how to make sure you get approved by affiliate networks so you can participate in the programs they work with.  I think the information he gave actually works on two levels – both the network and the merchant level (if the merchant program you work for actually hand reviews applications.)

Here are a couple of recommendations that he brought up that I fully concur with:

• Have Your Own Domain Name: Affiliate network representatives have told me on several occasions, in most cases they will not approve an account application with a Google Blogger domain.  This is not to say you can’t get approved by any affiliate network or that you can’t find some level of success using Google Blogger, but eventually, for professionalism, branding, and business growth, you will need to purchase and create your own site with your own domain name.  This will go a long way towards network approval.
• Provide An Actual Physical Address On The Application: No PO Boxes, here.  If you’re leery about providing your home address, spend the money to get a box at the UPS Store (They provide actual physical addresses vs. PO Boxes.  They cost a little more, but it’s worth it.).  Granted, even this may cause some consternation with the affiliate networks (they might check Google Maps to see if this looks like a post office box or business address), but it’s loads better than a PO Box.

The domain thing is a relative biggie for me.  It’s not a big investment to pick up a domain of your own and a hosting account and if you are actually in this game to make money, you should definitely consider at least picking up a domain and a blog targeting your area of interest.   Please put a bit of time into it in advance as well.  Write some posts on your topic, review some products – bring something to the table.

If you decide to work with Squidoo lenses or something – make note on the application for the network and for the merchants when you apply for their program.

I manage about 7 programs and I get a TON  of applications every day.  I take at least a quick glance at each application that comes through to make sure there is a live site there, that the affiliate is a match for my merchant, and that the affiliate is who they claim to be.   If you make that easier, and your application jumps out at me as complete, you will be approved with less hassle.

On the address thing, I am more sticky on this for Pay Per Lead programs – on these programs, I am heavily invested in protecting my merchant, so the more info I can get on the potential affiliate, the better.   You would be amazed at how many times we’ve reviewed an application and noticed in doing some background research that an affiliate who claimed to be a North American woman was actually some offshore scammer attempting to get past us  by using a Post Office Box in the US and a fake name.

I’m not super sticky on this one… my friend Ian Larsen actually caught some heat on the affiliate boards because he got a bad feeling on an application and used Google Earth to track down the given address of a shady applicant for his program.

The bottom line is this… the easier you make it for me to do my job, the quicker I will get your application processed and the sooner you can get to earning some commissions.

Last bit of advice – if your network gives you a “Notes” field on the application where you can describe your plans for marketing a specific program USE IT!    Each day I get applications from people who list sites that have nothing to do with my clients…. and I have to try to figure out the fit.   If you explain it to me, I don’t have to try to track you down to get the answers I need.

Are all affiliate managers as tough on applicants as I am ?  No

But – if you can make it easy for me to do what I need to do for my clients, it opens me up to spend time with you on helping you figure out how to make some money working with my clients.

Affiliate with Squidoo Experience Needed

Do you have experience using Squidoo as an affiliate?

I’m looking for an “expert” to work with me on a coming webcast aimed at helping Christians interested in affiliate marketing, but possessing minimum web skills, get started.

I think that Squidoo is an awesome tool for this, but I’d love to chat with someone who has made some money doing this to help me as ai attempt to “teach men (and women) how to fish” in a new project I am undertaking.

If you are interested, please get in touch via the contact form.

I’ll make you famous and the video of this event will be archived for future viewing.

Thanks and God Bless,

Wade

Great site – How NOT to market with Squidoo

I got a really cool email this morning – my Squidoo Lens of the Day.

I have mentioned Squidoo in the past as a good tool to use for non-technical people who want to get started in affiliate marketing.  I’ve seen a lot of “lenses” from good to bad and the email today focused on “The Best Squidoo Lens NOT To Do.”

Yep – that’s right – a guy actually set up a Squidoo Lens to illustrate all the mistakes NOT to make if you decide to market with Squidoo Lenses.

What the heck is Squidoo?  From Wikipedia:

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses—single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommendations and advice than pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions. Squidoo has a Top 100 list by topic, by rank, by group and for Giant lenses. There are about 22 different topics like Health & Medicine, Food & Cooking, Business and many more.

In any case – the point the guys had is this – if your whole business plan of marketing with a Squidoo Lens is about setting one up, then slapping up links to every product you want to sell without contributing some content and point of view to the project – save yourself the time.  I have seen affiliates who do really well with Squidoo.  Their common trait is that they spend time and effort building out a great resource for the reader, and surround the resources with well selected products that are going to appeal to that audience and in best cases, the products themselves can contribute to the conversation.

So – newbies and experienced affiliates alike…. get out there and market with Squidoo.  Please do your audience (and yourself) a favor and contribute to the conversation.

Tip for Merchants – Personalize your affiliate communications

I have been looking at a lot of affiliate program pages and various action generated emails from those programs over the last week as I compile my Christian Affiliate Program Directory eBook.   I see one mistake happening quite a  bit and I wanted to address it.

Time and time again, I see emails signed by “The XXXX.com Affiliate Team”  or “XXXXX Affiliate Manager”  and I think these guys are making a mistake.   Affiliate Marketing is a RELATIONSHIP BUSINESS – bigger than life.   I don’t know about you, but most of my “relationships” are one to one and not “one to team.”

Your affiliate emails and affiliate program page are a chance for you to show affiliates that your program values them enough to put a person in charge of dealing with them and handling their needs.  In an ideal world, the affiliate manager would actually have some contact information on the affiliate and pick up the phone from time to time and get to know their affiliates.  You’d be amazed at the activation you will see if you do this.

In the case of my company, we have 3 of us that an affiliate could be in contact with – so we’ll sign emails:

Wade, Karen and Joel
Affiliate Managers
XYZ.com Affiliate Program
affiliates@xyz.com

This is the LEAST that you should be doing -

I’m actually moving to a model where I make my name, email address, cell phone and a chat handle  or two available to affiliates.

As an affiliate – few things are more frustrating than having a question about a program and having no easy to identify contact to get in touch with or means to get in touch with them.

Personalize your communications with your affiliates from the start.  You will be glad you did.

God Bless,

Wade

AffSpot.com – a new forum for the affiliate marketing industry

I am really excited to be involved with the launch of a new forum for the affiliate marketing industry at www.affspot.com

Here is a video from AffSpot founder Sam Harrelson on AffSpot and what the goals of the forum are:

Forums like this are important because they are gathering places for the industry and places where people can exchange ideas in a public forum. As an affiliate, merchant, or service provider, there is much that can be learned from watching and more importantly participating in the discussion as you become comfortable and have something to share, whether this is insight on someone else’s question, or a question of your own.

You will notice that my company GTO Management and the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association have forums set up at AffSpot now. I hope you will join us there.

How to apply for affiliate programs

Okay – so the topic seems a little basic… all there is to it is to find a program you want to join, fill out their network or affiliate software application and off you go right?

Well… maybe.

If you are an experienced affiliate with a live site or blog that directly deals with the audience that the product or service appeals to and you have some traffic and other affiliate links posted, you are probably fine.

But what if your site or blog is new?

What if you plan to promote by a method that is not visible online like paid search or email marketing?

Here’s what I suggest to get your applications approved:

New Site or Blog:

1. Please DON’T apply with a “site under construction” or a domain that doesn’t resolve – you will get your application  refused 99.44% of the time if a live body is reviewing your app.
2. Please DON’T apply with your template based site and the placeholder content still in place.
3. Please DON’T apply with an email address that doesn’t resolve.
4. Please DO -  put some time into writing some content on your site for a few weeks or a month before you apply for any programs.   If you have no content – you will get no traffic, and visitors won’t stay long enough to click an affiliate link anyway.
5. Please DO- put up a page that you use in your affiliate program applications that lays out your VISION for your site and what you plan to do with it in terms of content and how you will get traffic.
6. If you don’t know how you will get traffic, I would suggest that you do some research on sites like ABestWeb.com and BlogClassroom as well as read up on Social media marketing to see how you can round up some traffic.  With no means of acquiring traffic – all the affiliate links in the world will not help you out.
7. Please DO- write on something you are knowledgeable in, or are throwing yourself into learning about and share your knowledge and insight – then surround your awesome and compelling content from offers that would appeal to your audience
8. Definitely DON’T – throw up a “banner farm,” what is a banner farm?  It’s a site where an “affiliate” throws up a bunch of banners with no content whatsoever.   THEY DON’T WORK

Paid Search or Email Marketing:

Please put up a page on your site or your blog that addresses how you market.  If you are a paid search marketer, talk a bit about the kind of sites you work with well, what engines you work on, and what your approximate average monthly spend is.   At the very least, identify that you are a paid search marketer.

If you are email marketing, please do the same thing and please provide links to some of your past email newsletters that show unsubscribe links and CAN-SPAM compliance.  PLEASE ONLY DO AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH LISTS THAT YOU OWN…. and that you have verifiable permission (preferably double opt in) to market to.

Please also provide some breakdowns on the demographics of the lists that you own so that I (or one of my affiliate manager buddies) can tell if your lists are a match for our merchant.

I think these suggestions will help you achieve a higher approval rate as well as a higher rate of success in affiliate marketing.

God Bless,

Wade

CAM Blog Podcast #13 : Rachel Honoway of Affiliate Classroom Live

I had the pleasure today of sitting down for a chat with one of my oldest friends in the business – Rachel Honoway – the VP of Marketing at Affiliate Classroom. Rachel and I go back to about 2001 when I joined Kowabunga Technologies as the original manager at Team Affiliate – KB’s outsourced program management division. Rach was awesome to work for and is one of the sharp minds in the business.

We talked quite a bit about the Affiliate Classroom Live event coming up on the Saturday preceding the Affiliate Summit East in August. I attended the initial Affiliate Classroom Live event in Las Vegas and it was well put together in terms of speakers and was well organized as well. My only complaint was that there were no tables for laptops and notebooks and that the chairs were not the most compfortable. Rach has promised more comfortable accomodations. The event was a full day event with more classroom content than networking time and was definitely intended as a pre-sell for the Affiliate Manager Certification that Affiliate Classroom was releasing at the time.

Rachel mentioned that this event will be more networking focused. There will be some classroom sesstions this time lead by Heather Paulson and Rebecca Madigan as well as a number of Round Table discussions lead by industry luminaries like:

• Peter Figueredo
• Trisha Lyn Fawver
• Lee “The Lead Man” Gientke
• Sam Harrelson
• Lisa Riolo
• Brad Waller
• Karen Garcia
• Wade Tonkin

Lisa Riolo’s presentation sounds really interesting as she is focusing on how to sell an affiliate program internally as this can be tricky. Affiliate marketing and the techniques involved can be a bit tricky to sell in some companies and I am sure that Lisa will have some awesome metrics that we can use to help make the case to either launch an affiliate program for the first time with a client, or to help garner more resources for the affiliate channel.

You can find more information and register for Affiliate Classroom Live at www.affiliateclassroomlive.com

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Affiliate Advice- Moving past the banner farm

I see it again and again; affiliates applying for an affiliate program of a merchant I work with.  I go to the application and click on the link to their site that they submitted for review.   I find…… a page full of banners and little or no content.

I do some homework with some cool little tools that I use to evaluate site’s traffic and I find very little or no traffic.   I’m not surprised.  Why would there be traffic?

Would you as a shopper knowingly seek out a page made up of just image ads?

The quality of the merchants you work with doesn’t even matter.   If you don’t offer any reason for someone to find you, let alone spend some time on your site, why would you expect them to act on your ads?

To be a successful affiliate – and by this, I mean someone who makes more than occassional latte’ or beer money from affiliate marketing, you need to add something to the conversation.  Better yet- why not start a conversation of your own?

“Banner farms” or sites made up of just a bunch of banner slapped up on a page – suck

Niche content pages are the way to go – find something you are passionate about, find a domain name that plays into your theme and start writing.   Review products, share your thoughts, share your expertise, react to other people’s thoughts and content – generate CONTENT.   Then, surround your content with ads targeting people who would be interested in your content.

Is your niche content page or blog about raising good Christian kids?   The you should be working with Nest Entertainment and Family Christian and promoting products that help parents raise good Christian kids.   Writing about Homeschooling from a Christian perspective?  You had better be hooked up with and promoting Alpha Omega Publications or Sonlight.

Do you see what I am saying?

Affiliate Marketing has NEVER been about just slapping up some banners and making money.  That is lazy.

Real affiliate marketing is about matching up people who are looking for a product with the product they want – and what better way to do that by giving your shoppers CONTENT to answer their questions and “pre-sell” them on the products that you would like them to buy.

You could also start a community based on your interest.  Chances are that other people have the same interests and concerns.  Let them start the conversations and suggests products and deals while you bring in the affiliate links.  It worked pretty well for FatWallet.com

Affiliate success is work… it’s not overnight.   But if you set out do do it the right way, you will be rewarded.

We’ll talk more tomorrow about pre-selling and reviews and the all important issue of INTEGRITY

God Bless,

Wade

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