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Saturday, February 6, 2010
The Way I See It: State of Affiliate Marketing Part 2 | ReveNews
ReveNews Online Revenue News & Opinions Since 1998The Way I See It: State of Affiliate Marketing Part 2
February 6th, 2010 by Matt McWilliamsMy fellow affiliate marketers, welcome to Part 2 of the State of Affiliate Marketing Union. I shared some of the wonderful things that affiliate marketing has going for it, including phenomenal growth despite the recession, in my post earlier this week. I feel the state of the affiliate marketing union is strong, but faces many challenges in the coming year.
And now the bad news. Surely, you knew it was coming. There are no silver lining comes without a cloud after all. First there is taxes then there is everything else…
Our Biggest Challenge
All kidding aside, there are serious challenges facing the affiliate marketing industry in the coming year. Unless you are an affiliate that’s been living under a rock, you know about the offspring of the so-called Amazon Tax which was first enacted in New York. Since that time the states of Rhode Island, and North Carolina passed similar legislation; and California and Hawaii came within a hair’s breadth of passing their own versions but thankfully the governors of those states vetoed the legislation. Even now, though, it is still not a dead issue in those states and we face new challenges like the current one in Colorado as well as in Vermont, Virginia, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Maine, South Carolina, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, West Virginia, and my home state of Tennessee.
Don’t see your state listed above? Consider yourself lucky, but odds are that such a tax will be proposed in your state or a bordering state very soon. Now with the aforementioned states enacting and others looking to follow, inevitable budget crises will see it occur in more states as they do whatever it takes to raise more revenue. You, Mr. or Ms. Affiliate, are the perfect target.
The time for apathy and inaction is over. The time for getting really ticked off and acting is now!
Let me put that another way: Get off your butt. Quit thinking it’s going to go away or that there is nothing you can do. Get mad and do something about it.
This is a call to arms. I don’t care if you hate politics, if you are a Democrat, Republican, or not even old enough to vote. Your jobs are at stake in some cases. Your very livelihood, if you do this full time, is on the line every time some half-witted state representative introduces legislation in a futile attempt to raise revenue through affiliates since they see Amazon as an easy target. Monkey see, monkey do.
I’ll step off the soapbox just in time and leave it at this: It’s not an exaggeration to say that the advertising tax is a serious threat to our industry so please join me and others in doing something about it!
What exactly can you do about it?
Numerous people: including Rebecca Madigan of the Performance Marketing Association, Melanie Seery of Affiliate Advocacy, to Brian Littleton of ShareASale, have made the following list of resources and ideas available.
First, get educated. Learn more about pending bills in your state. Seek out information from organizations like the Performance Marketing Association or Affiliate Advocacy. Learn what your state laws currently are and what the threat level is in your state.
The threat level is high in every state that has a sales tax. Assume the threat level is Code Red and act like it.
Second, visit the affiliate forums like ABestWeb which has an Affiliate Tax Laws category and look for the forum on tax laws in your state. If the forum does not have an active thread on your state, start something. Let others know you want to fight this! It only takes one eager and active affiliate to spark a fire in many others.
Next, get a list of state Representatives, Senators, and other important elected officials. This is easily attainable through your local state government website. Once you have the facts, be proactive, build out your network of friends, media contacts and discussions about the harmful potential of such legislation. Most importantly reach out to you’re the fellow affiliates in your state. If your state is not a serious threat now, it could be, so the time for organizing is now.
Be vigilant; if legislation is proposed be prepared to reach out to your representative legislators. Go to their offices, get to know their staff, send them emails and letters, make phone calls, and encourage others to do the same. Tell them your story. So many of them don’t understand the details so let them know that a real person is behind this, a real person with a real job that stands to suffer greatly if such a tax is passed.
Tell them how it will cost people their jobs. Inform them that early data is showing that the states like Rhode Island that have enacted similar legislation are showing no revenue from the tax. None!
Recently, affiliates in Colorado set a great example for the rest of us with 150 affiliates very active in the fight. Unfortunately the Colorado House just passed HB 1193 and the Senate Finance Committee moved to bring to the whole Chamber. Here is an excellent article by Scott Jangro that provides a recap of what happened in Colorado.
What a wonderful example of affiliates coming together to fight this!
Apathy is the biggest enemy to beating these taxes and saving our industry. Apathy is what keeps us home on a cold day instead of driving to a boring committee meeting at the state legislature. Apathy is what makes us think that a simple email to our legislator won’t make a difference. Apathy is what leads to the tax being passed and a slew of merchant terminations (note: Many merchants like us are taking a stand and not terminating affiliates at all, or providing support in our fight).
Beyond the Advertising Tax
After the advertising tax issues, the biggest ongoing challenge for many affiliates is the seemingly fickle nature of Google. Just because Google now operates an affiliate network doesn’t mean affiliate sites don’t still get Google Slapped.
I experienced this problem first hand. Sites that had done very well for many years suddenly disappeared from both the natural listings and paid listings in Google. In about two-thirds of the cases we encountered, the sites were doing everything right, according to Google’s own best practice standards, leaving both the affiliate and me totally bewildered and wondering what to do next. In a nutshell, their demise really, really sucked.
A quick look through the various forums provides some comfort when we find that this is not some sort of attack on review site affiliates or our industry, but rather what seems to be an all-out assault on all kinds of sites combined with the fickleness of the Google algorithm. Thankfully, in December of last year and in January of this year saw many of our affiliate sites climb out of the depths and re-emerge stronger than ever, with a few tweaks that we worked out together. We are cautiously optimistic that the changes we made will work long-term.
The Launch of New Under-Prepared Affiliate Programs
On the surface that may not seem like a challenge or threat to the industry at all, but I have noticed an explosion in affiliate programs that never should have been launched in the first place. These programs end up giving good programs, and the industry as a whole, a bad name.
Now, more than ever, I am seeing programs that are run unethically, programs with horrible trained affiliate managers if they have any managers at all. These programs seem to have a general attitude towards their affiliates that borders on downright contempt and disdain. Unfortunately, they are doing a good enough job of attracting many new affiliate marketers to their programs with their offers; to only then horribly represent our industry and leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
Often times good programs never get a chance to even work with aspiring new affiliates and the advertisers who may have launched with good if misguided intentions never give the affiliate channel a chance to grow. We all lose as a result.
In the coming year, my hope is that more and more unethical and shady programs will be brought to light and that the industry as a whole will do more to stand up to these merchants. Maybe through adopting an industry wide set of best practices. It’s in all of our best interests to put a barrier up to the bad ones, and to educate those who genuinely want to run good programs.
Thanks for reading. It’s hard to believe that there are less than eleven months left in 2010. I know for many of you, it is shaping up to be a record year. If we stand together we can make it a great one.
1 Comment
Andy Rodriguez said:Matt,
“Now, more than ever, I am seeing programs that are run unethically, programs with horrible trained affiliate managers if they have any managers at all.”
I’m seeing this as well and we have decided to re instate our affiliate manager training seminars. We are planning to run the first one of the year in Chicago during the month of April. Anyone interested should get in contact with us so we can schedule them and reserved them a seat.
Thanks buddy!
February 6th, 2010 at 9:17 am
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Social & Affiliate Marketing | Social Network + Article + PR = Long Term Online Business
Have you been looking for an affordable way to drive traffic to your website? Then you should probably look into writing articles as a means of getting traffic. Today’s world is highly competitive in almost every category, so the importance of getting traffic (the right kind at that) cannot be overemphasized.
Finding the right strategy that will get you targeted traffic can be your only means of survival, more so in the cutthroat world that is ecommerce.
Managing to rank high in the search engines can be a pretty nasty task if you don’t know how to do it. But fortunately for us there are plenty of ways to advertize our website and achieve a large amount of traffic to your site.
There is a wide variety of techniques that you can adapt to your advertising campaign. From paid advertizing (pay-per-click) or even to affiliate marketing. However, most of these require some sort of payment. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of ways that you can get your website known to the world and increase your traffic without spending a dime.
Writing articles is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website, and to make it even better, not only does it work but it is also free. So you might be asking yourself, how can writing a few articles help me get more traffic to my website? Right?
Here is a list of the top 7 ways that articles can improve the number of hits you receive on your webpage.
1. Ability to reach out to larger amounts of people
When you spend time writing an article, it would be an awful shame to not share it with readers. You can place your article on your website or you can submit it to popular sites like e-zines as well as other online publishers.
When you submit your article to sites such as these, you not only expose yourself to the world, but you also expose your website. All you have to do is include a link back to your site, or provide the needed information in the resource box. When you do this, you get exposure and FREE advertisement.
Submit your articles to popular e-zines and take advantage of their popularity. Other sites who find your article relevant may also link back to you. Thus, you increase your link popularity, which is one of the most important strategies in the internet world.
Remember that most people are looking for information online and by filling this need with your quality article; you may reap the benefit of more exposure and higher web traffic.
2. Free Way of Advertizing Your Website
When you submit your article to other websites it presents an opportunity for you to advertize your site without having to pay ridiculous amounts of cash. Although you should avoid the ever so popular marketing language in your articles and make it as informative and useful to your readers as you possibly can. Use the resource box to market yourself.
If your article happens to be useful and informative it will definitely make great impressions for your website and that could eventually lead in more traffic and ultimately the most important thing…sales.
If you have good quality content in the body of your article, that is way more effective than a few lines of ad space. Remember that you have a very special opportunity to presale your website for free to a prospective customer. So don’t drive them away, give them what they are looking for in your article…information.
3. Gain High Search Engine Ranking
Make a new page in your website where you will place your article. Make your article search engine friendly (optimize it). Use the best keywords that relate to your subject, and the meta-tags that will give your page the best results. As soon as you upload your new webpage, you’ll find that search engines will spider through it and this will help you and increase your ranking.
Do not forget that when your content is completely SEO friendly, it is a better possibility that you will get a higher ranking.
4. Increases Link Popularity
Instead of searching and finding other websites that agree to link to your site, you can instead submit an article to popular high-ranking sites. Make sure to remember to add your website link in the resource box.
If your article gets accepted to the website which you submitted to, you automatically gained a new link.
Gain as many backlinks as you possibly can. Links to your website is one of the major factors that search engines use to determine what your ranking is going to be, so if you have more links you will rank higher. Therefore, make sure that you write an article that will be especially useful to those who read it that way more sites are more willing to link to your site.
5. Ensure that your site meets the standards and is search engine friendly
Ensure that your site is full of keywords relating to your topic. Do not forget that keywords are one of the most important things that search engines use to determine your ranking in a search result.
Provide useful information on your website and avoid the temptation of using way too many keywords as a way to gain high rankings. The only thing that will happen if you stuff your site with keywords is that the people who you are trying to get to buy or take action on your site will be turned off.
Relevance and quality is still the most important things to consider when writing articles and it will be doubly useful to your site if you make these articles search-engine optimized.
7. You will get Good Impressions and great References
By writing excellent, original and relevant articles, you not only give your site exposure, you are also creating a good impression on your prospects.
Encourage more people to visit your site and do business with you by establishing an impressive reputation through your articles. Be seen as an expert in the field and you will ultimately gain more customers eager to do business with you.
7. Upgrades your credibility with references as well as personal testimonies
Certainly, your articles are going to receive feedbacks and testimonies when you publish them in e-zines and free article sites. Record these positive feedbacks and comments and use them as promotional material in your website or in any of your advertising efforts.
Your credibility will be greatly enhanced by these feedbacks, as it will create a good impression on your prospects as well as your existing customers. In this highly competitive world, excellent credibility and trust may be the only things you need to attract new customers or make loyal patrons out of your existing customers.
Original, relevant, useful and pertinent articles are important tools you should utilize to improve and explode your business. So remember, if you need a free way to advertise your website, writing articles is probably your best bet.
You now understand the importance of Article Directory’s so visit one and post an article and expose yourself to the world. If you’re searching for information on a certain niche perhaps you’d like to Read Articles instead.
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Friday, February 5, 2010
Shareaholic for Firefox - The best browser add-on extension to share, tweet, bookmark, save and e-mail web pages quickly
Over 100 supported destination services
Share links, videos, blogs, images with services you already use like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, WordPress, and more. No need to sign up for yet another service or account.
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
How To Grow Your Facebook Fan Page Community | Master The New Net
How To Grow Your Facebook Fan Page Community
Posted by admin on Monday, February 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment
In March 30th, 2009, Mashable.com published a great article outlining the 5 successful elements of a fan page written by Samir Balwani.
Here is a summary of the article’s key points:
Here are 5 suggestions which will help your Facebook Fan Page enjoy a larger following:
1.Network with other platforms.
- A good example is Victoria Secret who pushes the traffic they get on their home page towards their Facebook fan page
- Many companies expect their customers will find them automatically which is not true
- Make it easy for your customer to find you
2. Make your Fan Page a Resource
- For example, Dell has created a social media resource for small businesses. The page also offers deals and coupons
- Cons ider offering a resource outside your normal demographic to attract new customers to your business
3. Create contests that include participation
- Create contests which offer coupons can entice consumers to join
- Sears did this, offering $10 coupons. If you click on the coupon, you are taken to a page where Sears collects your information and sends you information about coupons and deals
- You can offer coupons, weekly deals and free shipping
4. Empower pre-existing pages
- Coca-Cola fan page, created by two users who liked Coca-Cola, has turned out to be the largest product page on Facebook
i. Coke didn’t take over the page. Instead it rewarded the users and brought them to Atlanta to see Coca-Cola’s facilities
ii. Now the page has the blessing of the company
iii. The two users made a video, talking about the history of the page
- Don’t take over unsanctioned pages.Instead reward consumer dedication
5. Target the proper demographic
- Make sure the Facebook demographic matches your own
- If your demographic isn’t in Facebook, you will have a hard time growing your Fan Page
In closing, creating a Facebook Fan page is simple. To get it working really well however takes time and dedication. It is unrealistic to think you can create a page and have an automatic huge following.
Build good content that is easy to share. Let people know about it. If you do this, your community will grow over time.
Filed under Blog Post, Facebook, Social Media General, Social Media Tools · Tagged with Facebook, Master The New Net, social media, susan rice-lincoln
Monday, February 1, 2010
Microsoft simplifies social networking
STAYING CONNECTED: Ooi explaining how Microsoft Windows Live integrates with other social network platforms during a media briefing session in Kuala Lumpur.
By CHONG JINN XIUNGintech@thestar.com.my
KUALA LUMPUR: Microsoft is latching on to the social networking game and is looking to simplify social networks through its Windows Live online service.
“The problem with social networking today is that there are simply too many options that it becomes difficult to keep track of all your friends in different social network groups,” said Microsoft head of Windows Live for Southeast Asia, Barrie Ooi.
Indeed, today’s social networking environment covers a diverse range of platforms that include Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and many more.
Also, different countries have different preferences for social networking groups such as QQ in China, CyWorld in South Korea, Mixi in Japan and MySpace in the United States.
All in one
“Instead of signing up for different social networking groups just to keep up with your friends, why not simplify your life by viewing everything on a single page?” asked Ooi.
Microsoft’s answer to the social networking dilemma, Windows Live, is projected to work as a central location for users to view all social networking activities in their network of friends.
Microsoft claims that Windows Live Home integrates well with all the most popular social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr.
Not limited to social networks, users can also read blog posts from Wordpress and Live Journal or check out what’s everyone listening to on music services like Last.fm and Pandora.
Extended services
The Windows Live experience also extends to several other services that includes Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Sky Drive.
“Windows Live Messenger retains a strong footing in Malaysia as the country’s most popular instant messaging client and we’re leveraging on it to point people to Windows Live,” Ooi said.
The latest version of Windows Live Messenger allows users to check on their contacts’ status updates on the “What’s New” feed on the bottom half of the application.
Possibly one of the most compelling reasons to use Windows Live is Sky Drive, Microsoft’s free online storage service that offers users 25GB of storage space to store and share their pictures, videos and documents.
“It may be hard to believe, but there’s really no catch to Sky Drive,” said Ooi. “Just sign into Windows Live and it’s there for you to use free of charge.”
Package deal
If you like to get your creative thinking cap on, the Windows Live Essential package includes Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker, which is another way to connect and share your photos and movies online.
Windows Photo Gallery works more like an extension of the built-in photo viewer in Windows but allows you to organise and find your photos easier by tagging faces in photos or through tags.
It also features some basic photo-fixing options and a cool panorama stitch feature. Once you are done organising your photos you can upload them directly to your Flickr or Facebook account.
Windows Movie Maker is another free application for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users that allows them to easily create family videos.
Simply select any number of photos and videos that you want and let the software’s handy auto movie maker do the rest, the company said.
Once users are done they can share their videos on YouTube or output in a TV-friendly file format.
According to Ooi, Microsoft isn’t limited to Windows Live alone for its social networking endeavours. There’s also Windows Live Writer, a desktop blog publishing tool that is compatible with most major blogs including Blogger, Live Journal, Wordpress and many more.
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