Friday Podcast: AC Certified with Rachel Honoway

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rachel honoway

It’s always a pleasure talking to affiliate marketing veteran Rachel Honoway who’s one of the pioneers at affiliate marketing service agency Kowabunga (later acquired by Think Partnership), having started in 1997.

She’s not only friendly, but highly knowledgeable about prevailing issues in the affiliate marketplace.

If you haven’t yet, check out Partnercentric president Linda Woods’ interview with Rachel on a recent episode of Affiliate Marketing Insider.

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For this edition of the Friday Podcast, we discussed:

  • Challenges for affiliate managers, especially in keeping up with your affiliates
  • The chronic issues related to talented affiliate managers leaving for greener pastures and how networks can address this
  • Highlights from the recent AC Certified workshop
  • Why Syntryx might be the “killer app” for affiliate managers
  • The rise of the Web 2.0 social/community-based affiliate
  • Jim Kukral’s role in the affiliate universe (with a pointer to the Daily Flip)
  • And lots of AC Certified goodness

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

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To find out more, visit: AC Certified

Web 2.0 Is A Dirty Word…

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Or should that be “Words”?

However, you cut it and define it, there’re marketers out there who do their best to make use of Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Metacafe, Youtube, Revver, forums and other social networking site (of the “Web 2.0” ilk) to generate adsense or affiliate income.

Some of them are spectacularly successful, while others just flame up and die, and have their accounts deleted en-masse.

So is Web 2.0 a “dead” technology for marketers?

Are Web 2.0 site destined to become a dead graveyard populated by “internet polluters“?

I don’t think so.

This issue came up during the taping of a Friday Podcast session with Affiliate Classroom’s Marketing VP and affiliate marketing industry veteran Rachel Honoway.

I was pretty impressed that Web 2.0-based affiliates ranked alongside SEO, PPC, Coupon, shopping comparison and other types of profiled affiliates in Affiliate Classroom’s new AC Certified program for Affiliate Managers.

If you recall, Jim Kukral presented a session on “Bloggers as the Next Generation of Super Affiliates” at Affiliate Summit West 2007.

And it’s great to see these new generation of affiliate marketers being profiled in the new program, and even better, there’re tips for new and experienced affiliate managers to reach out to these marketers.

But back to “Web 2.0” for a second.

If you’ve been reading this blog over the last couple of weeks, you’d pick up the thread that this Continue reading →

So The Hard Disk Goes Clink…Clink…Clink

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…and I am left scrambling wondering if my 3-year old Fujitsu Lifebook is about to give up the ghost…

More importantly, after the clean up from 2 weeks ago, whether I’m going to have the pleasure of backing up 75GB of data again.

Next stop: to call Fujitsu’s customer support and see if they will accept a pending “device failure” request and swap out the hard disk.

I am getting a new MacBook as part of a premium DSL package in about 2 weeks time, but still, I think PC blood runs in my veins.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

10,000 in Your List…Now What?

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One of my friends mentioned that he’s built a list of 10,000 opt-in members into his mailing list within a period of 7 days…so what’s he supposed to do now, he asks.

I don’t think any responsible email marketer will give advice before finding out more information.

For example, how was the list built? Using PPC? Expired domain traffic? Co-reg traffic? Via opt-ins through Squidoo or HubPages? Via an article directory? As a result of a follow up/update list after buying a product (either an affiliate product or your own product).

Each of these channels comes with it’s own level of permission – and if you’re a permission-based marketer, you’ll realized that someone who’s just bought something from you has a higher level of loyalty and stickiness, compared to someone who’s just downloaded a free report off your site.

So back to the 10,000 mailing list – determine the source of list/lead generation is important. Are they emotionally invested in you? Have they spent money purchasing something you offer? Called into one of your teleseminars and stayed the full duration because they found the information compelling? Are they merely curious strangers? Or evangelists for your brand (also known as “raving fans”).

Once you’ve sorted that out, you need to figure out the demographics of your list too. What’s their Continue reading →

Good Easter Bunny, Bad Easter Bunny…With Shawn Collins

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Affiliate marketing veteran Shawn Collins is known for a number of achievements…

If you like Shawn’s Road Trip/American Pie-ish style of humor, you’d want to check out this Easter bunny video broadcast:

Also, check out this Facebook thread where we’re aiming to hit 500 comments. Every little comment helps!

PPC Marketers Take Note: China-based Domain Phishing for Google Adwords Accounts

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I got this email over the weekend which looks like a genuine email from the Google Adwords team, mentioning that you need to authenticate your account because it’s been disabled/suspended.

fake google phishing email

Just about any PPC marketer will be concerned if they get an email like this because AdWords downtime could translate into a significant of profits.

Before you jump to the page and entering your account information, I checked that the HTML email was going to a *.cn (China-based) domain, so it would be pretty unwise to enter your username or your password.

Mozilla Firefox had earlier been patched with a “phishing site” notification, similarly Internet Explorer showed a similar warning when I tried to access the site.

Just take note of the destination URLs in your emails before clicking on them, also if needed view the message headers and you can usually spot their point of origination (unlikely that the Adwords team would be sending notification emails out of Africa or Russia).

There was also a port about this at KezNews.