Held in conjunction with the Affiliate Summit West tradeshow/conference, the Pinnacle Awards (the public relations industry has its own Pinnacle Awards which tends to dominate the SERPs…), recognize the best and brightest in the affiliate industry.
Here are this year’s winners:
- Affiliate of the Year – Mike Allen
- Affiliate Manager of the Year – Angel Djambazov
- Exceptional Merchant – CelebrateExpress.com
- Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Melanie Seery
- Best Blogger – Scott Jangro
- Affiliate Marketing Legend – Kellie Stevens
Nominations are being taken and close today (November 30th, 2009).
As Affiliate Summit co-founder, Shawn Collins, has pointed out, these are nominations, not votes, so there’s no necessity to rotate proxies a couple of hundred times and vote yourself in. You might do better to schmooze the Affiliate Summit advisory board who will review and vote on the recipients. Having said that, if you’ve flamed, insulted and challenged some of them to a fight, you’re not likely to win either.
Having said that, I won’t repeat the criteria for the 6 categories, and instead give my personal choices for the nominees.
Blogger of the year: It’s a close fight between Justin Barr’s AffBuzz (though it’s technically a blog/RSS aggregator vs a true blog) and Barman’s PPC.bz. Both are sites I visit almost every day to follow developments in the industry.
PPC.bz has distinguished itself this year by breaking the news that reputed con man Dennis Yu has perpetuated himself as being a reformed “scammy offer” promoter to going white hat, then being shown as using his local business promotion service as a front for adult/dating websites.
The man fronting PPC.bz “Barman” has said he’ll shed his anonymity and go on stage to claim the award if he wins. Then again, he might pull a Lady Gaga and throw a garbage bag over himself and claim the award through arm slits in the bag.
Some other interesting posts on PPC.bz –
And from the Barman himself, why you should vote his blog for various awards.
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Affiliate Manager of the Year: The winners in this category tend to be in-house affiliate managers or outsourced program managers for Pay-Per-Sale affiliate programs. Going outside (more…)
New and sometimes experienced internet marketers almost seem to go out of their way to sabotage their own success by taking the easy way out, even if they should know better.
A case in point – just because a forum allows you to post any question you like, and just because social media allows you to beep, chirp, tweet and post you like doesn’t mean you can avoid the routine of going to one of the search engines and attempting to find the answer yourself.
Remember the days predating the internet (meaning those of us born in the 1970s, 1960s and earlier…), when finding the answer to a question meant trudging down to your local library (or maybe local bookstore) and looking up the answer in a book? Whatever happened to that?
A lot of the growth of “content” on the internet is fuelled by the redundant questions asked over and over again. I bet Internet content would slim down faster than a power acai shake if the majority of excessive duplicate content were pared away, and redirects were added to the top 10 results for any query.
But laziness is not just limited to finding information to run your business, it’s sad that researching niches and marketing offers is given the lazy treatment, even when it has a direct impact on your income and ultimately your lifestyle. It’s choices like these that make it seem like too many marketers are driving at the first gear towards their destination (or goal). The problem is you might not reach there in this lifetime.
Here are some of the best forms of lazy marketing I encounter (and lead to this post being written…)
Clueless marketing: You’re new and don’t know anything. You’re too lazy to see what others are doing, or to consult another affiliate, merchant or affiliate manager. So you come up with some pretty abysmal (more…)
Malware and spyware may be getting more prevalent on the Facebook social network and one of the ways in which it’s distributed is via viruses/spyware delivered via email.
Unless you’re deliberately posting colon cleansing or teeth whitening links on your friends’ FB walls and PMing them, this is what might happen:
It’s not as bad as (more…)
The end may be in sight for Facebook Application developers with Facebook’s recent and ongoing clampdowns on incentive CPA offers embedded within Facebook applications (about 99% are entertainment or game related). And with this latest move, is Facebook shooting itself in the foot?
Since 2008 I’ve had a hand in helping Facebook developers monetize their applications. The most common of which was selling “game gold” (or game character avatars, outfits, castles) primarily using Paypal as a payment mechanism.
The other forms of FB application monetization involved adsense (typically with a sub-0.01% CTR rate) or CPM ads (about $0.50 CPM). So it was pretty tough making decent money from your FB app.
Enter CPA offer-driven ad networks like Social Media, OfferPal, Super Rewards and Gambit, which offered CPMs of $10-20. In some cases, depending on the offer, CPMs of $50 were not uncommon. Not surprising that these were driven by (more…)
If you haven’t got your tickets for Affiliate Summit West 2010 (in Las Vegas) yet, you should take action soon (affiliate summit discount code at the bottom of this post).
Prices for hotels and air travel have been going up and will be peaking towards the end of this month (Nov).
Here’re the low down on Affiliate Summit:
What is it?
Although there’re other shows like AdTech, PubCon, Blog World Expo, these tend to have an offline marketing slant to them (AdTech), or aside from affiliate marketing, veer sharply into other directions like blogging, SEO, legal issues. There’s also another “free” affiliate conference, though I think you get what you pay for. In my opinion, it’s always good to go to a few shows to connect with the online marketing industry (and get out of the house).
For the biggest bang for your buck, especially for affiliate marketing-related issues, Affiliate Summit wins hands-down in my opinion. I’m particularly looking forward to the product datafeed and automation sessions at this upcoming summit.
The parties (at least 2-3 major ones every evening) are great for entertainment and even better with networking with your affiliate manager and other affiliates. It also helps not to get caught in a compromising position (whether with an adult entertainer, or falling on your face on the Vegas strip, and having the episode distributed on Flickr or Youtube…).
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Which pass should you get?
There’s 3 classes of passes available: Silver, Gold, Platinum. Which should you get?
If you’re skint, you can try asking your affiliate network or affiliate manager if they can sponsor your pass, or if they’ve spare passes. They’d typically give these passes to their top affiliates, so unless you’re already a baller (or if the manager is really kind), you won’t be getting a free pass. If you’re already doing well, why’re you looking for a free pass anyway?
Shawn Collins (@AffiliateTip on Twitter) has been giving out codes for free Affiliate Summit passes over the past couple of days, so you can try your luck at scoring one.
But back to the passes:
Silver: This is the entry level (cheapest) pass and gives you access to the exhibit hall, meet market and keynotes).
The meet market like a mini tradeshow/swap meet that runs on the first day (Sunday) for a few hours from noon to 6pm. The exhibit spaces are tables, rather than booths and you’ll see smaller networks and merchants and a couple of service providers taking space here. I enjoy this part of the summit because of it’s intimate nature. Also because there’s a seminar track ongoing during the same time, you’ll have to balance your time at the meet market with the ongoing seminar sessions.
The silver pass will also give you access to the trade show which runs on the 2nd and 3rd day in a different hall. This is where many of the big affiliate and ad networks will take up booths and have their affiliate managers try to get you to sign up with them. It’s a good place to find out about new networks, and especially if you’re having difficulty getting your affiliate application accepted, having an affiliate manager contact might help get your application approved.
Keynote sessions – there’re 2 of them – Dr Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, will be delivering one and Brian “Copyblogger” Clark will be presenting the other. I’ve attended the keynotes every year I’ve been to the summits and none of them felt especially spectacular, so your mileage may vary.
Your silver pass also gives you (more…)
FinchSells has burst on the affiliate blogging scene this year, with a brand of sarcastic, yet insightful blog posts. Coupled with an in-your-face approach to affiliate marketing, “Finch” (not his real name) has generated a fair amount of buzz and been recently accepted into the 9Rules blog network.
So I got him on the phone from London to speak his mind. Some of the stuff we discussed:
- How he left school at 16 and got involved with online marketing
- How he made the transition from his job to doing affiliate marketing full time
- His first sources of traffic for his affiliate offers and how he’s narrowed it to one primary source: Facebook Ads.
- Some of the tips and techniques for optimizing conversions
- How to make Facebook Ads work
Check out the Friday Podcast below:
Links:
