Market Leverage ranks as one of the networks which effectively uses its marketing and branding budget to devastating effect. By contrast, I work with several networks with great affiliates managers, and one corp comm/PR person who isn’t really empowered to do much and/or doesn’t have any real budget to work with.
As networks see affiliate acquisition as part of the affiliate management success formula, doubtless there’ll be more resources channeled towards building a quality affiliate base.
I appreciated Market Leverage’s Digital Media Relations specialist Debby Phillips arranging a discussion with Market Leverage’s founder and CEO Mike Jenkins.
Mike’s certainly savvier than the average network owner (who’s typically a successful affiliate marketer turned network owner). Conducting some research, I’ve found that Mike has been involved in the business management aspects for a number of pretty large listed firms too.
I especially like how he’s constructed a holistic business ecosystem under his PrecisionPlayMedia group – with 3 components – DigitalLeads (an in-house offer production/packaging subsidiary), Market Leverage (the CPA network arm) and InboxBeyond (an email publishing arm) – which is how the top tier CPA networks structure their business.
During the discussion, we also touched on, but haven’t fully resolved the issue of whether the community-building /relationship-building approaches of social marketing via blogs,video will eventually clash head-on with the current incarnation of affiliate marketing, with the mostly shorter emphasis on one-off lead acquisition payout.
It’ll also be interesting to track Market Leverage’s upcoming announcements in the next 2-3 months.
I first communicated with Jim Kukral when I saw he was presenting a session on bloggers as the next wave of super affiliates during Affiliate Summit West 2007. Since then we’ve been talking over email, and he’s probably one of the few geekcasters who remembers I’m from Singapore (I’m not from Thailand, Sam….geeze!).
Aside from his experience at Kowabunga, and as one of the co-founders of ReveNews (with Wayne Porter) and having launched BlogKits, Scratchback and the now (infamous?) TwitterMeThis, Jim has just launched the Online Video Toolkit this week – a series of video tutorials on setting up to create video content.
Besides talking about the launch of OVT, we also discussed a number of video marketing strategies and its future prospect for online marketers.
Check out this week’s edition of the Friday Podcast
Aside from being one of the most respected figures in the affiliate marketing industry, Scott Jangro is a guy who’s making waves with a number of his projects over at MechMedia.
I got an insight into how he’s structured one of his web properties, CostumZee, said by top affiliate Jeremy Palmer to be the largest affiliate for costumes online.
But more importantly, the biggest takeaway is understanding how Scott thinks and how he conceptualizes and executes a project. I like his system because I have a similar approach to running my internet business too – it’s everything to do with being around a year, and even 10 years from now.
One of the affiliate marketers I’d been following since I first started out in the industry was and continues to be Kim Rowley who owns Key Internet Marketing and has a network of shopping-themed niche sites.
Kim has come up with a number of great concepts for niche sites, and more than just the idea alone, she’s certainly one to take immediate action.
Although we’d talked a little before this past Affiliate Summit West and chatted briefly at the Summit, we’d been sharing some ideas in recent weeks and I was glad that she was able to take some time out to come on the podcast.
Besides hearing about her start in internet marketing, we also talked about strategies in setting up coupon/shopping/comparison type shopping sites and growing your online business.
As with previous Friday Podcasts, we covered a lot of ground in this episode and you can check out the podcast below:
This week I got the recently nominated “Minister for Social Media” (yes, he drinks beer and curses…sorry, Jangro) Sam Harrelson on skype, and we chatted about the social media scene.
It’s the “thin client” computing discussion which Sam was refering to at the tailend of Geekcast Episode 13. (you knowyou’ve been listening to a lot of Geekcasts, when you’re typing “http://geekcast.fm/archives/category/geekcast/” into the browser address bar – bookmarks are overrated anyway…)
Besides having Sam do a rundown on his myriad of blogs/websites, we also talked about sci-fi, his new startup Big Idea Agency (the site design seems to change every couple of days, and viewing the page source sometimes shows some weird/arcane trivia).
Yes, there’s lots of social goodness ahead (together with a definition of “cloud computing”).
Florida-based CPA network Market Leverage has generated a fair amount of buzz with it’s Market Leverage TV video broadcasts and recent t-shirt campaigns and “care package” campaigns targeted at some of the most popular bloggers in the affiliate space, including John Chow, Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman, Chad Fredericksen, Ian Fernando, Kim Rowley and numerous others.
I had a chance to talk with 
I first communicated with 
Aside from being one of the most respected figures in the affiliate marketing industry, Scott Jangro is a guy who’s making waves with a number of his projects over at 
One of the affiliate marketers I’d been following since I first started out in the industry was and continues to be Kim Rowley who owns 
This week I got the recently nominated “Minister for Social Media” (yes, he drinks beer and curses…