Geordie Carswell was formerly CEO of affiliate network RevenueWire and a panelist on the “traffic generation and monetization tips for affiliates” at this January’s Affiliate Summit. Besides an expertise in PayPerClick strategies, Geordie’s a well-rounded marketer, using a variety of techniques to generate traffic and rank well in the search engines.
Having left affiliate management, Gerodie’s focused on his new venture as an affiliate marketer and actively oversees and manages several properties with his business partners.
I invited Gerodie on the Friday Podcast to get his insight on:
Techniques on setting up and optimizing PPC and SEO offers
How your AdWords account history can impact your PPC campaigns
PPC bidding strategies
His perspective on spytools and analytics services
How to continually keep yourself motivated to succeed and scale your business
ShareASale’s Director of Client Services Carolyn Tang AKA Catango is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable individuals in the industry and it was a pleasure to talk to her at the SaS booth, even though there were lots of people there.
As a tradeshow visitor, I’ve got more than my fair share of t-shirts, notepads, pens, paper weights and stationery to last 2.5 lifetimes. I liked how SaS did a little out of the box thinking to provide a photobooth where affiliates took some crazy pics (I’ll post mine later), and thoughtfully gave out baby T-shirts and bears. For affiliates with families or significant others, they’ll likely be seeing the SaS logo on a teddy bear or baby T for some time to come. (a good thing).
It was cool hanging out with top affiliates Colin “Google” McDougall and Ros Gardner over dinner at the Nobu Japanese restaurant at the Hard Rock for the private launch of Jim Lillig’s Offeratti network.
Considering that Colin doesn’t take raw food, it’s a testament to the great food at Nobu that Colin was enjoying the sashimi with the rest of us during the meal. It was also interesting to hear Colin tell his stories about his towed trailer that he rolls out for holidays. And if you’re looking for inspiration as you’re working towards your ideal affiliate lifestyle, Ros has bought a lot of nice toys/trinkets to enjoy the fruits of her labor.
It was great to meet affiliate network Market Leverage‘s marketing manager Dina Riccobono after talking to her over IM and being interviewed for MLTV late last year.
Market Leverage has a proactive outreach and affiliate recruitment program and it’s refreshing to see a network take the intiative in getting to know affiliates. They hosted a dinner at Switch at the Encore hotel, with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins in attendance. It was a great opportunity to talk to affiliate managers Mike Kelly and Jen Fluker to get insight into how affiliate managers operate.
At the dinner, Mike announced the launch of Market Leverage’s greenlinks program, which provides links to video-based affiliate training from the ML website interface.
Jen Goode, better known as JGoode, headed the Affiliate Summit mentors program and did a great job (I believe there were more than 100 mentees in the program). I also had a picture taken with the penguin and nearly kidnapped him. Ah well, maybe next time.
With Jon Fisher AKA AOJon , founder of the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum. I started making these “gang signs” because a number of the “affiliate gangstas” started making them.
Before the panel discussion on Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Sales Conversion on the first day of the summit with Miles Baker, Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes.
The session is geared towards newer and experienced marketers who’d like to tap on the expertise of the panel which spans search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, social media and blogging.
The panelists and I are compiling questions for the session.
If you’ve a question or issue, go ahead and list it in the comments below.
One of the keenest observations I’d heard from Sam Harrelson from an older episode of Geekcast is when he was in the process of adding Twitter to an affiliate network’s communication channels, some of the affiliate managers were happy that they had another channel to send out new offer information to.
If you’re an affiliate signed up to multiple networks, you’d receive a constant barrage of daily emails with subject lines like “network exclusives, promote now!”, “Highest payouts!” and “Hot new offers”.
Likewise, I’ve checked out a couple of affiliate marketing forums where networks have sponsored sections of the forums and populated these sections with “These offers are hot!” then proceed to list down payouts and offer caps.
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I don’t know how you feel, but this is pretty much tantamount to email and social network spamming by overzealous affiliate managers.
A good affiliate manager should know when to promote offers and when to back off. And emailing/hounding me when I say I’m busy is one way to get on my really bad side.
One of the best aspects of having a regular podcast like the Friday Podcast is being able to tap the brains and get ideas and inspiration for some of the brightest lights in blogging, affiliate marketing, PPC and search engine optimization.
And the inertia of business and projects has kept my intended blogroll update moving forward for a couple of months (yes, months).
If you’re headed to the Affiliate Summit next month, do drop a note in the comments below and be sure to say “hi” especially if we meet up at one of the parties or at the booths.
Here’re some of my old friends and new friends I’ve made in the last year (and recently added to the blogroll).
Miles Baker: A work-at-home dad who’s tried just about everything on the internet, Miles is a successful affiliate who’s built a healthy number of profitable sites. He’s one of the panelists at the affiliate panel on the first day of the Affiliate Summit.
NickyCakes: Nick calls himself a “reformed blackhat” whose main focus is on pay per click-based affiliate marketing. He’s posted a number of innovative affiliate strategies on his blog (in between pointing out perceived pretentiousness among certain affiliates). Nick will also be one of the panelists on the affiliate panel at 1230pm on the first day of the summit.
Geordie Carswell: Geordie’s the 3rd and final member of the affiliate panel. Though he doesn’t actively blog, he’s focused on building his new outfit, Diversion Marketing. Although he’s quite accomplished at PPC, he’s since started work on a couple of different projects and I might have him on a future episode of the Friday Podcast.
In the meantime, you can check out his previous appearance on the Friday Podcast where he talked about affiliate success strategies.
One of the perks of heading to Affiliate Summit West at the Rio hotel this coming January is the opportunity to meet the various guests on the Friday Podcast, some for the 1st time and some of the 10th time.
Next on the list would be the terrific networking events and parties, especially the near legendary ones hosted by the ShareASale affiliate network, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to bring home a polaroid with SAS founder Brian Littleton in his trademark sweatervests.
This isn’t to say that the sessions are to be unrated. (more…)
Geordie Carswell was formerly CEO of affiliate network RevenueWire and a panelist on the “traffic generation and monetization tips for affiliates” at this January’s Affiliate Summit. Besides an expertise in PayPerClick strategies, Geordie’s a well-rounded marketer, using a variety of techniques to generate traffic and rank well in the search engines.
