While surfing through the PepperJam affiliate network‘s list of merchants, I came across an interesting banner:

Because all the letters in the domain name are in lowercase, you’re open to interpret it in a different way.

One way could be “Blind Sex Press”. Leaving one to wonder…what is that?

–

Using a series of uppercase characters can help visitors instantly recognize the domain and can help pre-qualify the traffic.

In this case the merchant, Blinds Express, could consider changing their creatives to read BlindsExpress.com, instead of blindsexpress.com.

Affiliates can benefit too, because it will increase the return on their marketing spend.

–

Check out my previous post about the launch of the Pepperjam Network (PJN).

With that, here are the women of the Affiliate Summit:

Justine Ezarik is a lifecasting star who vlogs over at iJustine.tv. She spoke at the social marketing session with Sam Harrelson, Stephanie Agresta, Debbie Schultz and Tris Hussey sitting on the panel.

Schaaf Consulting’s Stephanie Harris spoke at the Anik Singal’s AC Certified workshop the day before Affiliate Summit.

Buy.com‘s Melissa Salas chaired the video marketing panel and also received the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Manager of the Year award. She’s done some great work with Buy.tv.

Irene Rojas is an affiliate manager with the OfferHive affiliate network based out of florida. Met her at the Affiliate Bash and she is friendly.

Carolyn Tang: I’ve talked to her on ABW and on Facebook and it was great to meet her at the summit. Carolyn’s probably the second most public face of ShareASale after ski fanatic and founder Brian Littleton. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk a whole lot, it was great to meet Carolyn and a number of the SAS merchants at the Affiliate Meet Market and the trade show.

Laura Alter, Lauren and Andrea Schoemaker

WickedFire regulars Laura Alter of Notebook Forums, Lauren AKA Turbolapp and my homie Andrea from PlanetAndrea…who’s been one of my buddies and supporters since I began.

Samantha Brachat: Sam over at NeverBlueAds has been a great affiliate manager and we did a podcast on seasonality and getting started in affiliate marketing. (Samantha Brachat Friday Podcast)

Heather Paulson:
We’ve exchanged emails and talked on the forums. I caught her presentation at the Affiliate Classroom Live workshop and it was a great opportunity to meet and talk to an experienced OPM and PPC manager like Heather at SAS’ Party Under the Stars. Check out the Paulson Management Group.

Danielle Nagami AKA MsDanielle
It’s always a great opportunity to meet people behind the blogs and meeting MsDanielle was no different. We were talking at the John Chow BBQ pig out the last day of the conference and I even got to carry her box around…

Robyn Jones
The former Ms Robyn Martin and now Mrs Kris Jones, always looking fab. Check out the PepperjamNetwork.

Rachel Honoway: Affiliate marketing veteran Rachel (who’s driving the AC Certified program) and I had some fun with the moving bed in the suite during the ShareASale party…but it’s really not what you think! If you haven’t yet, check out this edition of the Friday Podcast we did earlier. (Rachel Honoway Friday Podcast)

Julia Stead: We’ve talked on Linda Buquet’s 5Star Affiliate Marketing forum and I was surprised at how short she was.

Well, actually she’s like over 6′ and used to play basketball. We actually had got some footage of her and fellow ShareResults affiliate manager Jamie Fortunaso dancing on the couches at Tao during the Affiliate Bash, but the footage didn’t come out…

Ah well…ASE Boston I guess.

Debby Banning: Building trust and credibility is important in building your network and I first “met” Debby when she added me as a friend on Facebook. I checked out the link and saw that Mark Wielgus of 45n5.com was a common friend. Debby’s with Market Leverage.

Note: This is a snippet from the 300+ photos I took at the seminar. More to come, including some commentary and analysis of the topics covered during the show.

Check out details on the next Affiliate Summit

I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and might be useful for you:

• Lisa Picarille and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Thing“: A great weekly topical podcast, Lisa and Shawn usually have a number of industry experts on their show and cover the latest shows.
• Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookies: This is a new project which Sam has recently started up and it follows a “22 minute” (refering to the program length) daily podcast (5 days a week) format . It’ll be interesting to see Sam keep this up and perhaps make reference to it during the Social Marketing panel that he’ll be moderating at Affiliate Summit West. (Especially since the session synopsis reads “With almost 50% of Internet users now creating and sharing their own content, this new medium is changing how markets operate and how companies communicate with consumers.“
• Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney’s Shoemoney Show: Jeremy hosted the Net Income show which featured interesting guests and where Pepperjam’s Kris Jones talked about doing seasonal PPC campaigns based on UGG boots and the American Idol television series to great effect. The latest show continues the tradition.

In addition to these, I buy quite a number of information products on CD or MP3, and also have utilities to rip DVD videos into MP3 tracks, so finding more audio material to listen to isn’t an issue.

If you’re looking for more audio podcasts, you might also like to check out the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm. I spoke to WebmasterRadio founder Daron Babin (AKA SEGuru) last week and he mentioned that a number of new programs are in development.

Linda Woods’ (CEO and President of Partnercentric) new Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast looks interesting.

Shawn, Sam and Jim Kukral have recently launched/re-launched Geekcast.fm which will be a podcast aggregator of sorts.

For more podcasts, check out:

• Listing of podcasts on Shawn Collins’ iPod
• Carsten Cumbrowski’s Podcast Directory

Will you bring your affiliate income to the next level by promoting PJN affiliate programs?

More on that shortly, but rather than repeat the information that other bloggers have highlighted, you can read write-ups and view videos at:

• Shawn Collins’ Pepperjam Network intro and video
• David Lewis’ Revenews preview/review of PJN

Having been an early tester for PJN since its beta stage, I’ve seen the fledgling network (with a great pedigree) go through its early development stages, but the questions for most affiliates is: Does it deliver on it’s promise of an “Affiliate Marketing 2.0” network?

With about 100 merchants under its belt and have recruited a number of star Super Affiliates to promote its programs, Pepperjam will be focusing on building up its merchant and affiliate support and promotion efforts in the coming months. You can likewise expect to see an impressive booth at the Affiliate Summit West next month.

I’ve spoken to Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director Robyn Jones a number of times about the affiliate programs they’ve managed and you can see many of these programs, previously listed at Commission Junction and the other major networks now offered on PJN.

I have faced a number of issues with affiliate cookies not lodging correctly on some of the major networks (with sometimes less than enthusiastic support in pursuing these lost sales), and PJN’s affiliated-focused approach means that you have a higher chance of ensuring that your marketing efforts are accurately compensated. (eg. less “lost” sales).

The panel to search for merchant programs and get affiliate links is similar to other tier-1 affiliate networks, as is the ability to tag Sub IDs to your links for better tracking.

I believe the design of the program has a lot to do with Pepperjam head honcho’s experience as a PPC marketer and incorporates a number of PPC-friendly tracking and analytics features.

One of the interesting features of PJN is the ability to create a customized widget, known as pepperjamADS.

Smarter and more sophisticated affiliates will be able to select and rotate merchants and create a changing widget on their blogs or content sites.

Think of a more user-controlled Google adsense block on your sites, featuring merchants you select. The performance-based nature (pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale) of the payouts means your potential return on investment (ROI) will be at least 10 times higher than what you might expect from a comparable contextual pay-per-click advertising program.

Note: This payout is only going to give you these returns if you spend some time doing appropriate strategic marketing to match appropriate offers to your traffic profile, rather than the “fire-and-forget” nature of Google Adsense, AdBrite, Yahoo Search Marketing or other contextual type ads.

In my eyes, Pepperjam has been really strong in recruiting merchants in the lifestyle/fashion niche, such as fashion lines from Kimora Simmons (of BabyPhat Fashion/America’s Next Top Model fame), Nelly, Beyone’s Dereon and other lines.

If you’re running a mass entertainment/lifestyle website, you’ll have ample tools at your fingertips to monetize effectively.

–

What I’m interested in looking at will be the included and constantly evolving datafeed capabilites form the merchants. If you’ve worked with XML datafeeds, you’ll know that they’re not the easiest data to work with, unless you’re using a script to process the data, or a service provider like Asif Malik’s GoldenCan.

So it’ll be interesting to see how smart affiliates are going to create shopping and catalog sites from the datafeeds.

–

Additionally, PJN has an education/resources area, for new affiliates.

This is a great idea and something I had mentioned would be useful to include some time back:

At the moment it’s mainly outgoing links to blogs, forums and paid affiliate training (like Affiliate Classroom).

Over time, it’ll be great to see some of the PJ team develop in-house training resources because I think the “software” training materials are probably just as important, if not more important than the “hardware” feed generators, widget code and analytics.

—

The Bottomline: Having a new affiliate network entrant always means more choice for affiliate marketers, and the test and mettle of the network will be proven as affiliates promote the programs and check that leads and sales are being tracked accurately.

Also with PJN entering the arena, it means that sales going through their system will go past adware detectors, like the ones built into Windows and third party adware software like Spybot and AdAware which have flagged tracking cookies from the major affiliate networks as “potential security threats”.

If you are in a consumer-related niche, eg lifestyle, entertainment, fashion, you’d want to monetize your traffic more effectively with PJN’s merchants as it’s going to give you a higher ROI compared to contextually-targeted advertising systems.

–

If any, one grouse I have with Pepperjam’s in-house affiliate recruiting system (to recruit sub-affiliates) is that it’s a flat $5 payout per lead, unlike the typical 2% – 4% commission that a number of the other networks are paying out.

Granted it does go up to $7 per signup once you hit a high number of sub-affiliates, but it’ll be nice to have a recurring overriding commission to provide an incentive to groom those you recruit.

==

To sign up for PepperjamNetwork, check out:

–> The PepperjamNetwork Affiliate Network

I called the merchant and talk to them, and what they told me surprised me.

But first, a summary: With a gap in a web service merchant’s affiliate commission payouts on an affiliate network and their in-house program, I was keen to hear what veterans in the affiliate industry had to say. The commission payout through the affiliate network was about 50% higher, compared to the merchant’s in-house program.

Communicating with the merchant was certainly a key point in addressing this issue and some might say the information gap was being unfairly used in this instance:

“That’s retarded. Tell them to retroactively apply the network rate to your in-house sales from the date they started that network rate. If they won’t, dump them..” – Geordie Carswell, RevenueWire EVP.

“I attribute the fault in this to the affiliate manager/team handling your account. It is he or she’s job is to make sure affiliates (super or not) are taken care of. That person should have given you the choice as to which network you promote their program through, or at least told you about both offers. You are a well known affiliate and blogger and you should have been informed of both options. The affiliate marketing managers of Pepperjam are in constant contact with the affiliates who make a difference our programs. We build and form relationships to gain trust. The affiliate manager who was assigned to you did not do that.” – Robyn Martin, Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director.

“Before I began working for LinkConnector Affiliate Network, I was the affiliate manager for a few different companies. I considered it one of my responsibilities to keep our payouts consistent between the in-house program and the network programs. If anything, our in-house program sometimes had a higher payout because no additional fees were involved. I would never have considered that disparity between commissions – that’s just shooting yourself in the foot.” – Jeannine Crooks, LinkConnector.com Affiliate Sales Manager.

“I personally feel strongly that bigger and pro-actively managed programs SHOULD offer 2 versions.
In-house and a good network. TYPICALLY, but not in this case the in-house commissions would be a little higher, possibly longer cookies, etc. to make the in-house option more attractive and offset network costs…a possible scenario hit me that COULD make sense of this situation. Not saying this scenario would make the situation any easier for you to take but…
If the merchant, like many are was clueless and the affiliate program was not being tended to properly and they hired an OPM.” – Linda Buquet, 5Star Affiliate Programs Founder.[See the 5Star discussion thread]

Which is in-line with what I would expect. An in-house program would have lower operating costs and could give out higher payouts, but the opposite scenario is at work here.

And Chickenfeed AKA Millnic Media‘s Jason Bailey chimed in with:

“you got hosed and it is your own fault. This IS the standard practice and fully within the marketers code of ethics. (I can see the shit flying at me already…)…In House programs are notoriously low payers. They are also usually the most poorly managed of the places you can pull a particular offer from. CPA networks have schwacks of experience with a wide variety of offers, merchants and publishers. In house affiliate managers are often the webmaster as well, and quite possibly the night doorman to boot (not always — **dodges shit** –)…

You got hosed. If you were doing well at $60, think how much better you’ll at $90. Hell if the CPA network is offering at $90 on the street and you can push some volume, I’ll bet the can get $95 no sweat. Suck it up. Don’t make that mistake again. Lot at the bright side – You just got a $30 pay bump!..Join all the big networks and shop around. Get them fighting each other for your traffic. You have to be the squeaky wheel to get the big payouts. Logging into CJ to see what is new doesn’t cut it.

And as Share Results Network affiliate manager Julia Stead suggests:

“Doing the research is necessary to find the top payout. I often have affiliates negotiate/barter payout rates with me for certain offers that are available through other networks, however it’s helpful to keep in mind that payout isn’t the only factor when choosing which network/program to partner with. That being said, the huge payout discrepancy that you experienced seems unusually high. ”

As an affiliate marketer, having all the information at your fingers (joining both affiliate networks AND a merchant in-house program) are necessary if you want to succeed.

Remember, as an affiliate marketer, you’re more a traffic broker, so you need to join every relevant program relevant to your niche.

I heard some interesting alternatives to the situation too:

“Merchant should be required to disclose to affiliate what networks their offers are running on + in house offers and what the respective payout are. Affiliate have a right to know. This could be done through industry self-regulation.” – Amit Mehta, Super Affiliate, SuperAffiliateMindset.com.

“I’d attribute this to one of two things:
1) lack of communication between two people that are handing things at the company. I was on the short end of this at a previous job when I managed the affiliate program. There was somebody else in the company doing “media buys” for a higher caliber of publisher than i was getting. Turned out they were cannibalizing some of my biggest affiliates for 50% more than I was permitted to pay.

2) pure idiocy. Some companies really don’t think affiliates will connect the dots when they wildly vary payouts in different places.

Either way, tell them you expect $100 a lead now.” – Shawn Collins, Shawn Collins Consulting, AffiliateTip blog, Affiliate Summit.

—

So what was the outcome?

I called the merchant during their stated hours of operation “8am to 6pm” for affiliate and business development matters. And was told the affiliate guy comes in at 10am. So much for posting that information on the website.

I never got to talk to the affiliate manager and instead spoke to a series of sales guys. All of whom told me the same thing “The affiliate network determines the payout.”

“But aren’t you paying the affiliate network? Don’t you plan to synchronise your payouts?”

“The affiliate network is a third party, we don’t control them. We aren’t concerned about the commission discrepancy. You can choose which program you want to promote.”

Perhaps they could pitch this development as a new reality TV series: “Affiliate Programs Gone Wild”.

So much for customer service. I’ll be promoting other merchants from now on.

Daron Babin’s (SE Guru) WebmasterRadio.fm is home to a ton of great content and I listen to many of the great shows there.

This week, Affiliate Thing, hosted by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille and Affliate Summit co-founder and affiliate marketing fixture Shawn Collins talked about the new podcast shows like:

• Jeff Doak and Sam Harrelson’s “Jeff and Sam Talk Tech, Marketing, Teh Internets and Stuff“
• Jim Kukral and Steve Rosenbaum’s “Video Ninjas“

and the new Shoemoney Show. (I guess Jeremy might have a little more time following the sale of AuctionAds to Media Whiz)

It was great to hear that Shawn listens to my Friday Podcast and mentioned it on the episode “The British Invasion: Affiliate Style” as well as on his blog entry “The Podcasts on my iPod“.

Besides checking out Affiliate Thing and the Shoemoney show, I also recommend new affiliate marketers to check out the “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts. Although the show is currently inactive, it’s worth checking out the archive for episodes hosted by Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer. The 2004-2005 episodes hosted by ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel are an excellent primer.

Although it might sound like I listen to many podcasts, I usually have a couple of gig on my hard disk and listen to it when I can.

I have a Nokia N73 Music Edition smart phone with about 2GB of memory on it, at the moment I’ve got John Carlton’s “Kickass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” and Mike Litman/Matt Bacak’s “Ultimate Lifestyle Workshop” on it. The rest of the memory is taken up by video footage of my daughter, Bianca Wee.

Carsten Cumbrowski has podcast resources listed at his resource site Cumbrowski.com.

I just bought about $400 worth of used teleconferencing equipment off eBay (and had to pay about $30 in taxes when it got to Singapore), so you might hear more interesting Friday Podcasts in the near future.

In the meantime, if I had a wishlist of podcast shows, I would be interested in tuning in to the following:

• “The Super Affiliate Show” hosted by Jeremy Palmer and Amit Mehta.
• Pepperjam head honcho Kris Jones and his fiancee (and also Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director) Robyn Martin in the “Mr and Mrs Jones Affiliate Show” (they’re sure to blow the socks off the Brangelina “Mr and Mrs Smith” flick)
• “Blogging Strategies and Secrets” featuring SleepyBlogger and MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins and the Blogga from Down Unda’ Yaro Starak.
• “SEO Gurus” with webmastworld denizens Todd “Stundubl” Malicoat and Michael “Graywolf” Gray
• “The 5Star – ShareResults” show with 5Star Affiliate president Linda Buquet and ShareResult’s tap dancer and affiliate manager Jamie Fortunaso

I realize that the last thing you’d want to do is see another “5 Podcasts I’d Like To See” meme spreading around (and I’m suffering from meme fatigue too).

Let’s restrict it to the comments and if you want to blog and trackback to here, I’ll help publicize your posts.

But what I’m most interested in is your opinion on the concepts I’ve proposed, maybe I’ll shoot Daron an email. Or if there’re shows you’d like to see (that’s not on WMR already), list it in the comments and more interestingly, why you’d think it’d work.

Here are the tag rules:

Here are the tag rules:

• Each player must post these rules first.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write about their eight facts on their blog.
• At the end of your blog post, choose eight people to get tagged, list their names, and link to them.
• Don’t forget to contact them telling them they’re tagged. Also, point them to your blog post so they know what to do.

Here’re the my 8 “facts”:

1. Payouts don’t tell the entire story. If an offer doesn’t convert, even at $150 a lead, it doesn’t do you any good.
2. The Affiliate marketing big guns are using PPC (PayPerClick) traffic to drive traffic in great volume to their sites. Check out Gauder Chaudry’s PayPerClickFormula and blogs from PPC Super Affiliates like Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Kris Jones and Geordie Carswell, Andrew Johnson, Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Tip and Aojon’s Affiliate Marketing Blog among others if you want to gain the competitive edge.
3. Knowledge is going to be your biggest weapon and who you know is going to be a big part of it. I like visiting and more importantly, contributing to forums like the WickedFire Affiliate Marketing and 5Star Affiliate Marketing Forum. Once I get a number of projects off the ground, I plan to get more involved in ABestWeb. If you haven’t listened to ABestWeb founder Haiko De Poel’s “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts on WebmasterRadio from back in 2004 and 2005, you’re missing out.
4. Join a quality CPA network. Do your homework, check network reputations with other super affiliates. Make sure you have a great affiliate manager supporting you. Besides giving you marketing tips, they can help bump your commissions once you start generating quality leads. I like Copeac (Danielle Iovino), AzoogleAds (Erin Hughes) and MaxBounty (Jessica Dagg). [If you join as part of my affiliate network through my links. Drop me an email and I’ll help you get started].
5. Internet Marketing is more about “Marketing” than merely the “Internet”/tech side of things. You need to be able to establish rapport, build relationships with merchants, affiliate networks and fellow affiliates. If you’re a prima donna, you get relegated to the “has beens” once your numbers drop. Build bridges, create connections to key players in your market. Do whatever you said you’d promise to do. [Many marketers fail on this point…]
6. Constantly add value in whatever you do. If you’re looking for the quick fix, or a shortcut to bumping your affiliate revenue, you can probably game one of the sites out there and get a blip on your commissions for the month, but it’s not likely to be long term. Focus on building a long term business and it’ll continue bringing you income even when you’re not tending to it (which was the original intent of starting a business, wasn’t it?)

Ok, I better add 2 personal “bits” to conform to the meme.

• I grew up mostly in Singapore, which is a small diamond-shaped island about 30 miles long and 50 miles wide. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not in China, but rather in the proximity of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Singapore was a British colony in the 19th and early 20th century, so our education system is British-based. Planet Andrea AKA Andrea Schoemaker remarked that I spoke like Austin Powers the first time she met me.
• I like country cooking. There’s nothing better than biscuits and gravy, grits, hashbrowns, farmers sausage and Texas BBQ for me. [I head over to the local IHOP and Waffle House for some chocolate pancakes whenever I’m in the US]. Mudpies and Cold Stone Creamery ice-cream rank up there too.

The meme stipulates tagging 8 (yes, that’s EIGHT) people to propagate the meme further, though I’ve noticed that most folks have been tagging 4…

My tags go out to:

• Reformed Black Hat Marketer Howie Schwartz
• PPC Super Affiliate Geordie Carswell
• Content Guru Matt Sherborne
• MyBlogLog Community Manager and Fellow Blogger SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins
• Instigator Blogger Ben Yoskovitz
• Traffic King Ross Goldberg
• Internet Marketer Rachel Rofe
• 5Star Affiliate Linda Buquet

You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.

It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).

Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.

With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.

This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to a demographic/psychographic-based focus.

Just imagine BoomJ providing a variety of finance-related, health-related, biz op-related offers and you can see that the potential for revenue multiplication is very high.

It goes beyond providing an offer, to building a relationship, and that’s where the opportunities show themselves.

WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller has mentioned the start of the Niche Network Era. Some might say it’s a revolution, but perhaps it’s more an evolution of the social community idea kicked off by the behemoths like MySpace and Facebook, into something that’s financially sustainable and self-sufficient.

It’s more than just collecting warm bodies, it’s turning into a real business.

But increasingly, spam marketers have been bombarding the social networking site, such that there is a toggle to view messages only from members of your social network (and cut out messages from non-members (potentially spammers).

MyBlogLog obviously views the matter seriously enough to take further measures.

Witness the latest salvo:

I was in the midst of posting messages to PepperJam’s Kris “Mr Pepperjam” Jones and Robyn Martin‘s MyBlogLog profiles. [To comment on the latest Meet the PepperJam Team video]

There’s now a daily message cap of about 20 messages sent per day.

[Check out the MBL blog post “Spam-a-lama-dama” for details]

In my opinion, MyBlogLog is one of the most, if not THE site, for white hat social marketers.

Having a quota on messages you send out will hurt you if you’ve:

• A large network
• Used MBL as your mode of communication with your community

On the other hand, will this anti-spam measure hamper spam marketers?

Well, they might create multiple profiles, and multiply the 20 messages by the number of profiles they create.

So it would eventually hurt legitimate users more than spammers.

I think the key here is looking beyond just the technology.

For social traffic strategies to work effectively, there has to be a human governance element involved. Which is the major pitfall of the “web2.0” traffic products out there now.

If your answer to create traffic is just to game Digg, del.icio.us, MBL is just to bank on technology alone, you’re doomed to fail. Or occasionally create blips of ultra bursts on your traffic charts.

Does that necessarily build a community? Or build a list of prospects?

Possibly, but I’d think that incorporating the human element will create a complete system, rather just give a 50% equation (based on technology only…).

[And to prove my point, I’m in the process of developing a social traffic system incorporating organic elements. Being holistic is important because there are just too many ‘incomplete’ products out there!]

For MyBlogLog and similar sites to succeed, the developers need to look further to incorporate a trust, credibility, or some form of reputation, that eventually ties into your message or posting quota.

If nothing else, take a page from the reputation systems incorporated into many of the forums across the net.

PepperJam head honcho Kris Jones and Andrew Wee at Affiliate Summit West, Jan 2007

If you’ve been reading the PepperJamBlog for any length of time, you’d discover a treasure trove of information and can bump up your Internet Marketing efforts.

In his latest post “Affiliate Marketing – Thinking Outside the Box“, Kris dishes out the dirt on how he recently executed a campaign grossing $30,000 in sales, netting $15,000 in profit. And while some Super Affiliates may net six or seven figures in income per month, consider that Kris spent 15 minutes setting up this campaign.

So Kris has made a killing off UGG Boots.

How would he further enhance his efforts?

Using a psychographic approach to define the profile of the customers, perhaps they’re outdoor adventurers.

I’m sure most of them would need socks to go with that. Perhaps a speciality padded sock which minimizes Achilles heel injuries. If they love the great outdoors, they might be looking for a quality compass, or what about a set of walkie talkies?

If they’re buying the boots for winter use, would something like the Oakley Razor Blades be a complimentary product? Or a stylish Thinsulate clothing accessory or jacket?

By profiling your customer base and crossselling and upselling related items to them, you can effectively double and triple your profile, with ZERO acquisition cost (you’re already ‘acquired’ and pre-qualified them with their first purchase).

If you do a survey and collect their preferences, you can get the basis to develop an information product, which address their questions with pinpoint accuracy.

Perhaps boots aren’t your thing?

It’s an easy matter to use a tool like Google Trends to scope out trend hotspots and prepare your campaign to monetize the trend easily.

If nothing else, focusing on the core business basics will keep you very comfortable and if you’re look for inspiration for your next campaign, check out Jo Han Mok’s Internet Millionaire Code.

Sure, everyone may know that it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, or “Rich Site Summary”. Or if you go back to it’s earlier definition RDF Site Summary.

But what does it all mean?

And is it a new technology.

Again, like blogging, RSS traces it’s roots for a number of years. To 1999 in fact.

RSS is a way of accessing content from blogs and podcasts via a easy to use interface.

While RSS was used to broadcast content from personal blogs previously, increasingly businesses and online marketers are using RSS feeds as a means of generating brand awareness and to promote products and services too.

The bugbear with RSS however, lies in the fact that it requires some techy know how to set up successfully.

Microsoft has announced that the new Windows Vista incorporates RSS support.

Given that I will be holding back on a Vista upgrade for some time (and I suspect others will also), here’re some intermediate solutions.

My preference is to install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, which incorporates RSS support.

Another program I like is the Blog Explosion RSS Reader.

If you’ve just started out with your blogging efforts, joining Blog Explosion’s free traffic program can give you a head start in generating traffic. It will also give you explosure to other great blogs out there.

What I especially like about Blog Explosion is that besides the traffic that it generates, listing your blog in the Blog Explosion directory creates a Google PageRank backlink to your blog. My particular backlink is rated a PR3.

If you’re prefer an online RSS reader accessible via your web browser:

• Google Reader
• My Yahoo!

The direct benefit of setting up these two services and subscribing to your own feed means that your blog will be spidered by Google and Yahoo regularly and be indexed on these search engines much more easily.

With all that laid out, here’s my biggest peeve about RSS.

Actually it’s more to do with RSS publishers.

Bigger is not always better.

A lot are under the illusion that the bigger, the better.

As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back “Size matters not”

I don’t specifically see myself as a designer.

In fact, I’m pretty horrible when it comes to design sometimes.

But take a look at some of the RSS icons I’ve seen on some blogs:

Let’s start with the ones that aren’t effective:

Found in the right sidebar of a blog. The orange, when blown up, looks ghastly. The 3-D effect doesn’t help either.

Still hurts my eyes. Found in the left sidebar of a blog.

Really, it’s too over-the-top.

Do you find it crass?

Perhaps you might agree with:

Taken from the 10 Ways to a Killer Blog series I worked on earlier, originally by Robert Scoble.

Here’re some better implementations of RSS publicity:

Shoemoney‘s a big blogger. You’ll need to hunt to pick up his RSS feed. It’s located in the bottom left corner of his blog.

Pepperjam has a slew of RSS options in their right sidebar. For aesthetic reasons, I’d probably recommend keep it to 3 options, or a maximum of 5. Too many options creates clutter on your blog real estate.

I like Todd Malicoat‘s presentation of his RSS feed. It appears in his right sidebar, above the fold. The orange contrast against the black background is pretty pleasant. As is the handwritten font for “Subscribe”

ProBlogger Darren Rowse has the above information appearing in his left sidebar. The RSS feed is accessible via the XML or feedburner button. Nice, clean, compact design.

BlueHatSEO Eli has a nice presentation of his RSS feed too, appearing just below the header graphic in the right sidebar.

—

If you’re planning to publish a blog and offer your RSS feeds for subscription, the orange icon with the three slanted lines (which originated in the Mozilla Firefox browser) would be most easily recognizable, than the “XML” or “RSS” icons.

As adoption of Windows Vista ramps up, you can be sure that RSS will become a more important technology for content publishers.

Though the results lag real time searches by about 2 months, they’re good for getting an indication of search volume and related searches for given keywords and keyphrases.

In the past few weeks, there’s been speculation that with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing (AKA Panama), the Overture tool might be taken down for good.

[Incidentally, Pepperjam head honcho Kris Jones gives a good overview of Panama with his post: The New Yahoo Search (aka, Panama) Looking More & More Like Google Adwords ]

While there’s no official word from Yahoo!, it looks like traffic to Overture, while dropping since the disruption in the service sometime around mid December 2006, is still very robust.

So it was a little surprising that the Overture tool appeared to be up when I accessed it a short while ago, and ran a keyword search.

Which was a little surprising as the tool appeared to be down when I tried to access it.

In the interim, the WickedFire folks have been compiling a list of other keyword research tools. This’ll be no doubt useful if Overture is eventually removed.

Among the tools I’ve looked into, Wordze seems to be gaining popularity.

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward who conceptualized Affiliate Summit and have been grown it from strength-to-strength at about 200 participants in the first AS in 2003 till more than 2,000 at the recently concluded ASW.

It was a great opportunity to meet up face-to-face with a number of the online marketers I’d been reading and talking with over the past few months like ShoeMoney, Scott Jangro, Kris Jones, PlanetAndrea, Jon Fisher from WickedFire and Joe Whyte.

Becky “Webmoxy” Ryan was a friendly and intelligent person to talk to (even though I was deep in thought and seemed to have unintentionally ignored her when she called out a few times).

Maura, Robyn, Andrew Wee at the Pepperjam booth

Shoemoney’s assistant Nicole

Webmoxy Becky Ryan

More surprising still was the fact that a number of affiliate managers and affiliates whom I hadn’t met prior to ASW mentioned they enjoyed reading this blog.

Blogging can be a solitary affair and it’s comforting to have face-to-face validation (which gives a human face to the otherwise clinical awstats’ 6000+ monthly uniques).

Although I missed them, perhaps I’ll have a chance to catch up with Super Affiliate Ros Gardner, BlogKits founder Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson and SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins at the next event. I heard Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis had to leave Sunday evening for school, so I probably missed them by a hair.

What I greatly appreciated was the opportunity to meet Mike Krongel and his team over at Copeac. They threw a killer party for the WickedFire folks over at the Caramel Loung in the Bellagio.

It’s a great opportunity to have met up with WickedFire founders Jon and Brandon and WF members like John “I like c**k”, SEO_Mike, chrislingle, lerchmo, jDog, DruSam, Surly, Kaveman, Smaxor, Jon Warass, ExEngima, Rick.

Mike Peters from Software Projects had some interesting stories to tell too.

I’ve been listening to some of the post-ASW buzz and one of the issues I’ve heard is that the workshops didn’t provide good information.

I think the major element of a ‘summit’ is to share ideas. And given the time constraint of a 1.5 hour session, I’d doubt it’s fair to compare AS’ workshop sessions with Elite Retreat or other multiple day workshop focused on a single topic like SEO or list building.

I had the opportunity to speak to merchants making their first foray into affiliate marketing and they seemed to have got basic information to follow up on their efforts.

The biggest benefit of ASW is ‘being there’.

And ShoeMoney has rightly pointed out that the best exchange of ideas takes place after the workshop, in the bars and restaurants after the sessions end. In a more relaxed environment, you have an open exchange of ideas and trading information on what works and what doesn’t.

And herein lies the rub, Internet Marketing has more to do with relationship building and personal contact, than just the technology aspect that people generally get obsessed about.

Online marketing is more than composing the best Web copy, or optimizing your landing page or PPC campaign.

If you don’t have grassroot supports from your peers, whether it’s getting feedback on something you’re implementing, or even working together on a project, you can still succeed, it will just take a much longer time.

You can, of course, read about ASW and other events from this blog, though in the long run you’d be missing out on some great networking opportunities.

Affiliate Summit East will be coming up later this year.

Will you be there?

Attendees from the first ER paid $4,500 per head to attend the exclusive event.

The upcoming second ER to be held on 19 and 20th March in San Francisco is raising some hackles with its $4,950 price tag.

I’ve often heard the question on the forums and a number of Internet Marketers have been asking me this question:

Is it too much?

And often I hear the gripe that paying $4,950 which works out to $2,500 per day over the 2 day workshop is too much.

I think there’s a major problem here.

And the problem is with the person asking the question.

See, I have been doing business consulting and training and managing start-ups for the better part of 10 years.

I’ve almost never looked just at how much something costs, because that’s only half the equation.

What’s more, ok, I understate it here, what’s of the utmost importance whether you should invest in the opportunity is your return on your investment (ROI if you want the jargon).

If you spend $1,000 on an investment, what would you like to get out of it? $1,050? $2,000? $10,000?

My personal benchmark has always been to get a minimum 10 times return on my investment.

If I were to spend $5,000 on an opportunity, I’d expect to get at least $50,000 back in net profits.

So the question is whether Elite Retreat is overpriced?

Looking at this issue rationally, value is a function of your return over your investment (Return / Investment).

This are the two constraints on the issue:

1. The investment is fixed ($4,950)
2. The return is not fixed.

The return is determined by what you want to get out of the event.

Speaking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) on the sidelines of Affiliate Summit West, he mentioned that one of the ER participants from the first workshop was now generating $2,000 a day.

Ok, I’d admit that I didn’t nail Shoemoney on whether it was gross or net profit. But even assuming a worst case scenario that it was ‘only’ a 50% net profit, that’s a cool $1,000 a day, or $365,000 a year.

On a $4,000 investment.

So the issue now is whether the ER trainers will be able to deliver on their objectives to bring you to the next level.

This time around, they’ve assembled a cast of trainers comprising:

• Shoemoney (Search Engine Marketing, Branding, PPC, and Arbitrage)
• Kris Jones (Affiliate Marketing and Search Arbitrage)
• Lee Dodd (Community Building and Web Real Estate)
• Aaron Wall (Search Engine Optimization)
• Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse (Blogging and Monetization)
• Neil Patel (Social Media Optimization, Reputation Management, and Viral Marketing)

So between them, I believe they have most of the bases covered. I’d think that if you were more concerned about topics like domaining, copywriting, product creation, which aren’t specifically covered in the presentations (although some of the speakers have experience in these areas), what you can do to ensure your own success is:

1. Do your preliminary research beforehand
2. Do the necessary testing
3. Compile all the questions you have and bring them to ER.

Talk to the panel of trainers and fellow participants and do whatever it takes to get the necessary knowledge to get yourself to the next level.

I’m sure that even if they aren’t able to directly address your query, one of them will be able to direct you to resources to get the information you need.

Will going to ER provide the magic antidote to all your burning questions and make you an overnight millionaire?

Not likely.

Neither will signing up for a myriad of courses, or buying a million dollars worth of ebooks.

What will bring you the success you desire is the determination, perserverance and most importantly, effort, to move yourself one step closer to success.

Obviously, Shoemoney and his team have planned a roadmap for Elite Retreat to make it a major initiative this year with sessions planned in Orlando (May), Chicago (July), Phoenix (Sept), Dallas (Nov).

Should you consider investing the $4,950 for the event?

Only if you see yourself investing the effort necessary to bring yourself $50,000.

You can also read some of the related posts by:

• Kris Jones
• Neil Patel
• Shoemoney
• Lee Dodd
• Aaron Wall
• Darren Rowse

For more details, you can visit the Elite Retreat website or call PlanetAndrea at 1(800) 888-8151.

What’s his prediction of this year’s search trend?

“With Google’s quality scores coming into play, small and medium businesses with PPC budgets of less than $2 million, will see their prices increase, while conversions decrease”

Landing pages being one of the key determinants of quality scores.

Smaller search engines will provide lower quality opportunities, and result in a number of search arbitragers leaving the market. But the success ones will see an increase in their earnings.

pepperjamSEARCH’s Kris Jones and Andrew Wee

We also talked about the evolution of e-commerce since the fallout of 2000.

Having covered the fallout of the dotcom era’s leading lights like Lante, Organic, Scient and @McKinsey’s Internet Accelerator, I noted that the wave of SEO/SEM in recent times has become more bottomline-focused, rather than merely a global branding exercise.

It’s been encouraging to see many of the industry’s experts since then either go at it alone or form many of the new 2.0 SEM/strategy companies.

For those who’re new to the industry, the status quo will be accepted and taken for a fact.

But those of us who’ve been around since 2000, the evolution of the industry as epitomized by the success of events like Affiliate Summit, serves as a vindication for continuing to work at it.