Episode 56: Affiliates Elsewhere (about 22 mins / 22 mb’s)
Here’s the mp3 or head over to GeekCast.fm to hear the stream.
Show Notes
- TwatterMeThat
- Lost News
- I’m on Andrew Wee’s Friday Podcast
- Affiliates Elswewhere
- Pukka
- Callwave
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Podcast for January 09, 2007 (about 22 mins / 22mb’s)
Show Notes
- Think Geek Clearance Sale: Gizmodo
- Cory Booker to Keynote Affiliate Summit East in Boston: Affiliate Tip Blog
- No More Free Overnight Shipping from Zappos: Final Tag
- AuctionAds Morphs Into ShoppingAds: Center Networks
- ScratchBack’s 90% Payouts: ScratchBack Blog
- Wikia Search’s Poor Reviews: Ramblings of an Affiliate Marketer
- Affiliate Marketing Has a Future: AffiliateDogma.co.uk
- The Lazysphere and Decline of Deep Blogging: Steve Rubel
- **Dark Matter (Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy?): ITConversations**
- Jeff Molander’s Ignorance Economy
January 2, 2008 Podcast (about 22 minutes / 10mb’s)
Shownotes
Shawn Collins - “Year of Affiliate Video”
Danny Knautt - Kadigan.com Pushing Affiliate Boundaries with Video
Jim Kukral’s Daily Flip Show
Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Video Affiliate Site
Flip Camera
Jason Calacanis on Affiliate Spam in the SERPs
Social Marketing Directory 2008 and Beyond
Sam’s Twitter Page
Allen Stern - “Is Twitter F’ed?”
Dave Winer on Twitter’s Business Model
ScratchBack - Have Fun Making Money
Nifty widget to keep track of your AdSense earnings:
MacAdSense 0.5 - Widget displays AdSense earnings, click count, eCPM values and more. (Free): “
MacAdSense 0.5
MacAdSense shows your AdSense earnings, click count, eCPM values for the current month, and the extrapolated earnings for the whole month (by using a very simple rule of three method) on your Dashboard. All values are updated every 20 minutes.
“
(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)
For those of you who run affiliate blogs using the awesome Wordpress solution, here’s a nifty new service from the innovators at PopShops…
If you’re not familiar with PopShops, it’s an easy to use affiliate showcase tool, where you can quickly generate code to feature products for affiliate sites.
The PopShops plugin for WordPress enables affiliates to add PopShops shops as widgets, as well as popping in products within blog posts.
PopShops WordPress Widget Euphoria at Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins
Widgets are the new black in the affiliate networks space because of their ease of use, flexibility and server side advantages of not having to rely on content publishers to update creatives. Fraser has a nice write up on Affiliate Window’s beta test of its widget platform…
Affiliate Window are beta testing a nice little tool to create widgets which are very easy to include on your site. I think this is the start of easy to use solutions that have come from the time and energy Affiliate Window have invested in standardising all their merchant data feeds.
Affiliate Window Widgets - Fraser?s Affiliate Marketing Blog
Mashable has put together another great toolbox, this time focused on analytics packages…
From analyzing your RSS feed to counting page views to visual representations of where your visitors are clicking, there is no shortage of companies looking to help you better understand your web site?s traffic. In our latest ?toolbox? installment, we analyze (pun intended) the wide variety of applications and tools available for keeping tabs on how your sites, feeds, blogs, emails, or even your intranet is performing.
Video is hot and face time can drive higher conversions. If you run a marketing program that is highly personal in nature, you might want to consider including personalized video greetings (you can limit the amount of time visitors see the greeting, etc) with the Bubble Guru service.
I’ve tried this out on CostPerNews, but the audience there really doesn’t fit the type of crowd that would benefit (or provide higher conversions) from something like this.
However, you might have an affiliate site or blog that could…
Kevin wanted to introduce me, and you, to Bubble Guru, a service that allows you to record brief videos and add them to a page. These videos then appear in small ?bubbles? on the page, either automatically or when a link is clicked, and allow you to share a brief video message with your visitors.
Bubble Guru Adds Video Greeting to Your Web Site | Marketing Pilgrim
Carsten Cumbrowski has put together a very in depth post on PopShops, widgets and sites like Synthasite on his ReveNews blog:
PopShops is a tool that offers easy to generate mini shops and widgets for your site, feed or blog. PopShop lists over 800 merchants with over eight million products across the three leading affiliate networks CJ, LinkShare and ShareASale (more will follow). It also supports some in-house programs.
Definitely worth a read if you’d like to figure out how to monetize widgets in your affiliate program!
Pranav covers the increasing usage of Facebook as a marketing medium by more “1.0″ type merchants…
It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.
Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.
As Pranav points out, the fastest growing population of users aren’t broke college kids (you can find me there under “samharrelson”)…
e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API - Final Tag
Keith has info on how to grab the new Affiliates4u widgets if you have a presence on that forum and social network…
If your blog feed is included in the new blogs area on Affiliates4u you may be interested in the new back me widget that they have introduced.
Bloggers Grab Your Affiliates4u Widgets - Keith’s Affiliate Marketing Blog
I love widgets and have grand theories on how they will ultimately replace web pages and be the foundation of our browsing behavior (especially if the Apple iPhone opens up to 3rd parties as Facebook has done).
However, there are some practical uses of widgets that can make you money today. One of those is the newly announced Wize.com widget.
WidgetsLab (one of my favorite blogs) has a full run-down:
Wize.com the site devoted to providing customer reviews of everything, has just released a review widget that offers a commission for blog publishers.(thats you!)
Why do I want it?
The widget displays reviews of products based on what you are writing about on your blog. Basically what this means is…if you blog about fashion chances are that your Wize widget will display items such as clothing and accessories as well as anything else associated with fashion. The widget will display the three most popular (based on review) items that relate to what you blog about. This is incentive for your readers to purchase and when this happens you earn 50% commission on the sale.
So, this is basically a widget that works in a contextual fashion to display items that are related to your content (similar to what AdSense does in text).
The only problem, at this time, is that only bloggers using Typepad can implement the widget. Boo. Hopefully that will change soon, as I’d love to test this out.
So, if you do use Typepad, test it out and let us know the results.
It looks as if the widget space is heating up in affiliate marketing. The popular and well respected ShareASale affiliate network has implemented them, and Linkshare is testing them out. Other merchants such as Tumri are also implementing widgets for affiliates. So, get out there and investigate!
Video is all the rage as everyone tries to figure out how to monetize video within the context of affiliate marketing.
Qoof is entering the video race, but with an interesting slant towards affiliate marketing.
Here’s the basic pitch:
Usermercials™ are user generated recommendations that leverage the power of broadband video content delivery and enable the creator to finally generate solid revenue from their partnerships with online retail affiliate programs. Qoof allows for affiliates to link and tag their Usermercials™ to the associated product page so that they can earn money for every sale generated by their customers click throughs from Usermercials™. It is a completely free service that enables them to improve their marketing strategy and thereby increase their commissions. Members of Qoof can also upload their Usermercials™ to their favorite blogs, websites, and online social networks, thereby increasing viewership and ultimately sales. After that, all a customer has to do is click on the Buy It Now button, and they will be directed to the webpage appointed by the affiliate that sells the product they are advertising.
Currently, they are offering a $5 payout for the first 250 affiliates to register and upload a “usermercial.”
There’s no doubt that the line between content creation and monetization will continue to blur as we move into this brave new world of interactive advertising/marketing/content creation. I’ve always said that affiliate marketing has an incredible chance to lead the charge to monetize these new platforms because of its nature of relationship.
So, Qoof looks like an interesting step in the right direction. Give it a go and see what you think.
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