A work-at-home marketer complained that he gained 30 pounds in the last few years when his home-run online marketing business became successful. In fact, his wife stopped working, he was doing so well. He published an e-book on how he made it and he moved his family to a bigger house. He loves riding bikes with his kids and happily juggles his work hours and a new 11-month-old … [Read more...]
Double Down: Q & A with William Cooper
As the CEO of TradeDoubler - a Swedish performance network with a vast European presence - William Cooper has his eye on global expansion. TradeDoubler, with its local offices in 15 countries across Europe, is known as the biggest affiliate marketing network in the U.K. Cooper was appointed president and CEO in March of 2007, riding a wave of first-quarter revenue for 2007, up … [Read more...]
Harrison Gevirtz: The Yearling
This sounds like any hard worker in the performance marketing space, you think. The only difference is that Gevirtz is a freshman. No, he is not a freshman in college, not the next Shawn Fanning (of Napster fame) working out of a dorm room. Gevirtz is a freshman in high school - a 15- year-old wunderkind. Gevirtz first got exposed to the world of online commerce by selling … [Read more...]
Sweet Charity
If you think getting people to shop online is tough, consider the plight of nonprofit organizations. They ask people for their time and/or money, but instead of receiving goods, these donors simply get the satisfaction of doing good.Although nonprofit organizations may have a different agenda from the for-profit online marketers, many of the goals (building relationships, … [Read more...]
The Desire to Acquire
The new geography features auction-based ad exchanges and conglomerated companies with divisions that buy, sell and distribute ads: something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The emergence of these new entities with intertwined relationships has the potential to streamline the media marketplace and drive costs down and return on investment up. Consolidation will … [Read more...]
The Tangled Web of Link Spam
In my last column, you were warned to "Never watch sausage being made," lest you find the process so unappetizing you'd never eat it again. But even if you find sausage links tasty, you'll want to spit out those spam links every time.Last time, we explored the consequences of content spam, which include bad publicity and getting banned from the search engines. This time around, … [Read more...]
The Affiliate Lifestyle
For many aspiring affiliates, the phrase Affiliate Lifestyle conjures up visions of big beautiful homes and shiny new sports cars. Graphic images on affiliate training sites encourage visitors to imagine themselves at their desk, dressed in pajamas and smiling the big happy smile as hundred-dollar bills miraculously fly from their computer monitor. Those images often include a … [Read more...]
Bringing Your Website Into Focus
What can you do when you've invested in Web initiatives and it looks like the investment isn't paying off? For some industries, embracing the Web as a way to increase business has been a long, slow road. The good news is that every day, companies are pushing the envelope to create online tools and features that move their industry forward in search of the revenue-altering … [Read more...]
Old Dog, New Tricks
Forrester's March report, "Email Marketing Comes of Age," finds that clickthrough rates have remained steady since 2003, at an average of 5 percent, and that email is the No. 1 activity on the Web. And Datran Media's December 2006 annual email study found that 83.2 percent of respondents picked email marketing as the most important advertising tactic they planned to use in … [Read more...]
Look Out!
Last night you read on your local newspaper's website about how gas prices could reach $4 a gallon this summer, so you went to a car site to check out some reviews about hybrid vehicles and then visited an automaker site to learn about the car prices. This morning when you checked your email, you saw two ads for hybrid cars. Did you think - wow, this relevant ad sure is handy … [Read more...]
Ringing IN and Hanging UP
In the old days, a telephone came in two designs and had one ring. With the rise in cell phones, the styles are endless and so are the types of rings you can make the phone chime. There are master tones, ringback tones, polytones, monotones and they all have a price. Users can download them over the Internet and program a ring to sound only when mom or that special someone … [Read more...]