There are many myths regarding affiliate marketing that ought to be tucked away where you keep the collected works of the Brothers Grimm, Aesop and Mother Goose. They may be fun to read, but they are disastrous to any affiliate marketing campaign. There are hundreds of these myths circulating, but I'll deal with the top 10 of them here: MYTH: It's good to have a lot of white … [Read more...]
Crossing the Line
Years before the Nasdaq tanked and banner advertising died, e-commerce pioneers like Amazon.com and CDNow began partnering with topic-centric websites to drive revenues, paying a commission for each sale referred. The practice spread quickly and became known as "affiliate marketing." By early 1999, Forrester Research proclaimed "affiliate programs" as the Web's most effective … [Read more...]
Managing Affiliates in a Rapidly Growing Market
Over the past two years, the online real estate traffic volume has increased exponentially. Part of this dramatic growth is driven by the low interest rate environment, but a bigger reason for the increase is the rapid shift in realtor marketing dollars away from offline media - such as print - toward online advertising venues.Affiliates play a large role in the success of … [Read more...]
Don’t Give in to Click Fraud Fears
Click fraud is a potentially serious problem faced by any affiliate marketer who uses pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising to market their sites.One study estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of a PPC advertiser's budget is lost to fraud. That estimate increased to 50 percent for high-priced, highly competitive keywords.Unfortunately, there is no guaranteed way to … [Read more...]
Search for Tomorrow
It doesn't take Edwin Hubble to recognize that the search universe is expanding. Instead of studying faraway galaxies to see the shifts in the cosmos, it only takes a glance at the home page of any major search engine to realize that search is moving at light speed.The stars of search - America Online, Google, MSN and Yahoo - are attempting to extend their reach by launching a … [Read more...]
Think Global, Search Local
If you are looking for help with your water heater in Plano, Texas, Harvey West is your man. Type in "water heater plano texas" on Yahoo and this ad will come up as the top sponsored result: Harvey West Plumbing Company: Water Heater. Family owned and operated repair and replacement plumbing company with fair prices and fast service. $25.00 discount to all new customers.Off to … [Read more...]
The Cookie Conundrum
Cookies will drive you nuts. As you know, cookies - or very small files that recognize you as uniquely you to particular websites - are kind of the backbone of affiliate marketing. If the cookie didn't exist, there would be no way for you to claim the sale or track your core customers. This would effectively kill affiliate sites in their tracks.Or will it? Recent studies on … [Read more...]
Look Ma, No Print: Q & A with Michelle Bottomley
Traditional Madison Avenue advertising agencies have taken their share of lumps lately. More companies are spending bigger bucks to advertise online than ever before. Overall spending on advertising is expected to reach $279 billion this year.That's a 5.4 percent jump over 2004. However, Internet advertising is forecast to grow 15 percent over last year and hit nearly $8 … [Read more...]
Clean Sweep
You're thinking of working with a merchant, but you don't want to be involved in any program that includes affiliates using questionable, if not illegal, practices. But how can you know for sure whose program is squeaky clean and whose is not?It's not easy to tell which merchants have clean programs. Maybe that's because it's not easy to pin down exactly what "clean" … [Read more...]
Pedro Sostre: Follow Your Passion
Pedro Sostre is all about art and good design. And he's not afraid to voice his opinions on either subject."Most websites suck in terms of design," he says, though he also admits there are many design-oriented sites that are extremely well-done and that he'd be hard-pressed to single out just a handful of them.When it comes to art, he's fond of the impressionist style of … [Read more...]
Analyze This
Affiliates are capitalizing on the predictable behavioral patterns of consumers by using Web analytics tools to decode customers' habits and boost revenue. So if you're a publisher and want to know who exactly is visiting your site, how different types of visitors come back, what they are looking for when they arrive and what specifically makes them want to leave, you should … [Read more...]
Stand By Me
The last of the big independent affiliate and performance marketing networks was finally swallowed up by another large international conglomerate.In early September, Japanese e-commerce portal Rakuten took its first step into the U.S. market by agreeing to acquire privately held New York-based performance marketing network LinkShare for approximately $425 million in … [Read more...]
Danger: Clicking Ahead
Sometimes a click isn't really a click. Sometimes the person knocking on a website's door is really a wolf in shopper's clothing, perpetrating a fraud that wastes marketers' advertising dollars or steals commissions. Skip Pratt says his Web hosting company BAPort.com was being defrauded on 20 percent of its clicks. He was so frustrated by the problem that he developed a click … [Read more...]
Defend Yourself Against Click Fraud
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" That's what the Chicken Littles of the world would have you believe when they discuss how click fraud will doom the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Of course, some Chicken Littles have a vested interest in raising awareness of this supposedly rampant problem, considering many of them are the purveyors of products that help … [Read more...]