Tag Archives: affiliate marketing

Friday Podcast: Affiliate Marketing Tips with Jeremy Palmer

jeremy palmerI had a chance to chat with Super Affiliate and Commission Junction Top Performer Jeremy Palmer.

Jeremy talked about his affiliate marketing strategies and gave tips for new affiliates entering the industry.

Hear from this veteran about on topics like:

  • Tips to get started in affiliate marketing
  • Should you promote offers from affiliate networks, CPA networks or direct merchant offers
  • Take a look at some of Jeremy’s successful affiliate sites (FreeBudgetingSoftware, TrySuperPass and AudioBookHub)
  • Why you should get a few seasonal campaigns up
  • Sources to do your affiliate research
  • And Jeremy’s soon-to-be-released BlackInkProject

You should also check out Jeremy’s Quit Your Day Job blog.

Check out the podcast below:

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>>> The Black Ink Project

Is Your Internet Business Going To Be Around 5 Years From Today?

If you’ve been to Greenland or the Antartica (especially around the North Pole), you’d have seen numerous icebergs, some as big as a house, and many that are many times the size of an apartment complex or even bigger.

That’s your internet business. Get it?

iceberg

Picture if you will your internet business as represented by the iceberg.

It could be huge. It could be imposing.

Or it could be just a couple of ice cubes floating about in the water, blown all over the place by the wind.

Here’s the kicker.

Ice is about 90% of the density of water. So what you see is the “tip of the iceberg”. There’s another 90% of ice attached to what you see above the surface of the water.

Or is there?

Here is the problem facing 90% or more of pure-play Internet marketing efforts today…

They’re focused solely on lead generation, and often there is little longterm viability built into the business.

Some may say that CPA affiliates are pretty short-sighted because they’re selling leads (the majority who fill in email and zip submits and sell them to CPA networks for between $1 – $5 a lead).

But are affiliate marketers much better?

In most cases, affiliate marketers are only paid on the initial sales. Eg: a lead buys $200 worth of merchandise from Amazon or Overstock or Buy.com, and the affiliate earns from 2% to 10% of the sale value (depending on whether you’re getting bumped up payouts/are a top performer, etc).

In many cases, once Continue reading

How Users Consume Media = Monetization Strategies For You

I’ve been listening to an increasing number of audio podcasts and video posts in the last 12 months, branching beyond the books, magazines and printed PDFs (and occasional PDF I read on my screen) and a thought came to mind:

If you are a marketer are not going to where your leads/prospects/customers are coming from or going to, you could be putting yourself out of their traffic loop, and ultimately the monetization loop.

If you are a merchant or affiliate and primarily using the text channel – articles, blogs, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and even text ads on Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing, are you leaving yourself out of the traffic loop if your best prospects are walking around consuming their media on iPods?

Here’s a brief rundown of my media consumption:

Text: – newspaper, magazines, books, PDFs, text blogs, email -  I am usually sitting in front of my desk, in front of my computer when consuming text-based information. A large part of it has to do with being tethered to my computer.

Even though I have a laptop (actually 2 now…) and there’re a number of Wi-Fi zones around, and even though I have an Apple Touch, I Continue reading

Friday Podcast: The Future Of Affiliate Marketing With Shawn Collins

I had a chance to pick Affiliate Summit Co-Founder and affiliate advocate (and now affiliate marketer) Shawn Collins’ brain for his thoughts on the future of affiliate marketing, how affiliate networks and affiliates can deal with the fact that more than 80% of affiliate managers have more than 300 affiliates on their roster (about 20% of affiliate managers in Shawn’s survey handle more than 10,000 affiliates….pretty unreal).

And we also talk shop about how networks can up their game.

Our discussion built on a number of points raised in Shawn’s AffStat 2008 report in which 200 affiliate managers were surveyed and disclosed information about the industry. It was certainly nothing short of an eye-opening experience.

Check out the Friday Podcast:

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Filesize: 13 MB | Duration: 33 mins

And the AffStat 2008 report.

Internet Marketers, Should You Upgrade to WordPress 2.5 Now?

If you’ve been following the developments on the WordPress blog, you’d know that the new official release of WordPress 2.5 is out.

Besides better image handling – the new version has a pretty comprehensive built-in gallery (WordPress head developer honcho Matt Mullenweg did a preview screencast of the new gallery), it also has features like an enhanced in-built tagging feature, integrated analytics (so you get a better idea of your traffic picture without having to go to Google Analytics), a redesign of the user interface that should allow for more intuitive posting.

What’s uncertain is if embedding videos and other code requires having to muck around with the blog settings, because WordPress hasn’t really “played nice” with PHP, javascript and flash files in it’s previous incarnations.

Also, there’s a big question mark about the compatibility with WordPress plugins (generally developed by third party and independent developers) designed for earlier versions of WordPress.

So the $64,000 question (or perhaps in today’s context, the $1million question…) is Continue reading

Friday Podcast: AC Certified with Rachel Honoway

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.

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