It all started with Asa Candler, a "prescriptionist" in Atlanta 112 years ago. A modest pharmacist who dealt in tonics and medicines, he bought an unassuming recipe for a patent medicine called Coca-Cola. When he gave out handwritten slips of paper for customers to try the new drink for free, the coupon was born.The simple yet brilliant marketing idea Candler conceived has, of … [Read more...]
Out of Commission
How to Limit Commission Theft Find a trusted network and merchants. Ask other affiliates about their experiences with network partners, and if you are not being protected, take your business elsewhere. Likewise, if a merchant partner advertises via adware that is known to facilitate commission theft, you may be better off without them. Study your reports yourself for … [Read more...]
Guiding Lightly: Q & A with Anne Holland
Anne Holland is the president of MarketingSherpa, which aims to help marketers advance by sharing real-world marketing data and hard-won lessons. The Rhode Island-based company publishes a wide range of metrics guides, buyer's guides and how-to reports, as well as a 500+ case study library. Prior to founding MarketingSherpa in 2000, Holland spent 20 years in publishing. She … [Read more...]
Taking It Offline
If baseball is the thinking person's game, then online advertising is the thinking person's medium. Much like the national pastime, part of the draw of online advertising comes from the ability to break down performance into limitless particles of useful (and useless) information, such as batting average with runners in scoring position after the 7th inning, or the clickthrough … [Read more...]
Marketing Muscle
Over the years stories about intimidation and goons knocking on the doors of various affiliates and search marketers have circulated at industry events. Some of these scary accounts have taken on a life of their own - much like a game of telephone where fact and fiction are often intertwined as the stories are told over and over again. The victims claim to have seen a variety … [Read more...]
Colin McDougall: The Timekeeper
This past summer, super-affiliate Colin McDougall traveled around British Columbia with his family in his newly purchased travel trailer. From mid-July through Labor Day weekend McDougall worked a grand total of about 10 hours from the road. The rest of the time he spent paddling his kids around in an inflatable kayak, feeding the ducks, building sandcastles on the beach and … [Read more...]
Online Is Sweet
Food has recently been called everything from the new theater to the new porn. Regardless of how you think about food, you certainly can't avoid it. Food has become America's No. 1 obsession and food companies - from providers of high-end gourmet goodies to those feeding the fast-food nation - are battling to get on the dinner plates of today's consumers. And because everybody … [Read more...]
Search Is Getting Personal
Your phone rings. A good friend is calling, more excited than you've heard her in months. "My book is on the home page of Amazon! I can't believe it. My book was just published last week and already it's on Amazon's home page!" Exciting? Maybe not to someone who knows how Amazon works. Your friend has seen her book on her version of Amazon's home page, but a closer look shows … [Read more...]
A Call to Action
Someone is hijacking your traffic and stealing your commissions. That someone might be a competing affiliate marketer, or worse, the merchant whose products you are promoting. To my dismay, I discovered that traffic from one of my sites was being diverted when a friend sent me some screen captures of that site's home page. The first screen shot showed my site open in a browser … [Read more...]
You’ve Got Content, Now What?
I find that many website owners are divided into two camps. One camp is very good at developing unique content and garnering tons of search engine traffic, but they have a hard time turning that traffic into dollars. The other camp is great at monetizing traffic, but they can never generate very much traffic. In both cases the individuals involved eventually become discouraged … [Read more...]