Purple Squirrl

Affiliate Marketing News (Oct 29 to Nov 4)

More Businesses Using Web Marketing in the Bad Economy - Here’s something for the silver-lining department: Hard economic times will force more small businesses to become smarter marketers. They may even get Web sites. Check it out here.

Unlocking the potential of affiliate marketing - Spokesmen from Whitbread, Hilton and OMG are among the industry-leaders revealing the risks and rewards of affiliate marketing in this free online video. With marketing budgets under increasing pressure hear how your business could capitalise on the relative trackability and cost-efficiency of affiliate networks. Check it out here.

For Sale by Owner Wholesale Property Website Launches Affiliate Program - DiscountedProperties.com is a unique real estate listing service that caters to people looking for wholesale properties, homes for sale by owner, fixer-uppers and pre-foreclosures. DiscountedProperties.com has just launched an affiliate program where it will pay its “partners” a referral fee for any subscriptions resulting from their marketing efforts. Check it out here.

33 Reviews of the Best Affiliate Marketing Forums - A list of the top 33 affiliate marketing forums by Tim Scheer. Check it out here.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy - The Need Of Every Online Company - The online affiliate network has been well-integrated. But still there are online companies which are not able to achieve what they want. These online companies are in acute need of affiliate marketing strategy. To know more place your eyes on the following lines. Check it out here.

2nd Annual Casino Convention for Affiliates in Asia will be Held November 20-21 in Macau PR China - Ticonderoga Ventures, Inc. announces the second Annual Macau Casino Affiliate Convention will be held on November 20-21, 2008 in Macau at the recently built Venetian Hotel & Casino. Check it out here.

Old School Affiliate Marketing BEFORE The Internet - If you’ve ever looked at ways to make money online, then you’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing. To boil it down; affiliate marketing is delivering internet users through SEO or paid advertising to a merchants website in order to gain a commission on a sale or some other action. Check it out here.

Affiliate Marketing Network Blog Scorecard - As of October, Linkshare has apparently seen the light and jumped into the blogging fray. Good onya Linkshare. Check it out here.

Old School Affiliate Marketing BEFORE The Internet - If you think that only the novices have problems with affiliate marketing, think again. You’d be surprised to learn that many experienced individuals are by no means immune from making the same mistakes and bad decisions that ruin their progress. Check it out here.

Top 10 List of the Best Affiliate Networks - This list of the 10 Best Affiliate Networks will give you a general rundown on these affiliate networks and how they operate. Check it out here.

How to Choose The Best Affiliate Network Marketing Products - Affiliate network marketing has proved to be very lucrative. This concept is especially very important if you are in network marketing. Unfortunately, most affiliate marketers are not making the money they should be making. Check it out here.

Dating ebook experiments shows how to make money online

Lana R. (member of Gather.com) provides some great insight into an experiment she did with ebooks. She explains how she used the sale of ebooks to launch her affiliate marketing campaign. As you look around the web today this is an ongoing trend. There are a ton of free ebooks out there stuffed with affiliate deals. The author signs up with a bunch of affiliates on a certain topic then writes and ebook. In the ebook they suggest those affiliates as good destinations and the ebook customer then signs up with the affiliate - cha ching.

The experiment Lana R undertook was to use Torrent sites to advertise her ebooks and see how much she could push the envelope with SEX as the ebook topic. It turns out that even though these torrent directory sites (ie. the pirate bay) allow users to download apps illegally for the most part (or at least pushing the boundaries of what is legal) they will ban an ebook if the title is too obviously sexually explicit. So Lana R worked her experiment with a dating related ebook.

Here’s some info from her article on the affiliates she used -

Now I’ve tried a great number of adult dating sites, so here are two of my best performing STATS and results:

Disclaimer: These are my stats from various testing which I don’t track. So you should be able to get even higher conversion rates which turns to higher per signup $$$:

#1 - Iwant
7 uniques per FREE signup ($7.10 per free signup)
71 uniques per PAID signup ($50 *35/week* to $100 *279/week* per paid signup)

By far my best performing dating site, choose the Pay per Profile for starters and once you see more and more traffic, start using the Pay per Signup campaign instead.

#2 - AFinder
5 uniques per FREE signup ($0.35 per click)
55 uniques per PAID signup ($100 per paid signup)

My 2nd best performing affiliate site, only Pay Per Order is worth using.

Some of the takeaways from this experiment when creating an affiliate stuffed ebook -

1) You don’t need a website to make money online. Lana R did this without a webiste. She simply made the ebook and submitted it to torrent directories.

2) Title of the ebook has can’t be too sexually explicit or it will be banned.

3) The ebook should not be longer than 5 pages.

4) Create 2 or 3 versions of the ebooks and track success.

5) Sign up with 2 affiliates and track success. It’s best to do #3 & #4 independent of each other.

I like the idea behind this method but not crazy about the subject matter. So, I may try it on a different topic where I can provide good value.

Glam Media - pros & cons

The biggest issue when starting a website is traffic. Of course the business needs to make money but all web business models rely on web traffic. One way to get that traffic is to partner with a company like Glam Media. They have created a network where a partner site can post ads within the network at a share of revenue.

This is how they explain their deal -

” Here’s how it works. Our flagship site, Glam.com is the heart—helping drive traffic back and forth among the Glam Publisher Network, in an integrated way, and our publishers are the veins.

* Daily content feeds from sites in the Glam Publisher Network are featured on Glam.com’s homepage via headlines and direct links

* Content from corresponding publishers are highlighted across Glam Media channels on fashion, beauty, lifestyle, wellness, and others and via our network directories

* Glam Publisher banner ads embedded with rotating story and site links go out across the entire network, allowing all our publishers to enjoy the same integrated advertising exposure that Glam so adeptly provides for brand advertisers.

So one of the tactics I would like you to consider is participating in some community networks. One of the biggest and most effective is the Glam.com network.

After growing through their agreement here it is in a nutshell …

The good: In exchange for them selling ad space on your site they give you 50% and help drive awareness of your site.

1. you allocate some ad space to them and they sell ads on your site and it’s a 50% / 50% revenue share on the ads that are served on your site.

2. They then also allow you to put ads out on the network which is thousands of sites.

3. They also agree to promote your site from time to time.

4. You can put advertising from other networks like adsense so you are not limited to one advertising source.

The bad:

1. The ask you to sign on for a 2 year term.

2. They want you to put their ads above the fold

3. If in the 2 years someone wants to buy the site they have 1stt right of refusal at the same price as the other offer.

4. Because you join their ad network. They want credit for the traffic to your site.

Pepperjam Network - Why should you care?

At the moment Pepperjam Network seem to be the darling of the affiliate world. The are a full-service internet marketing agency and affiliate network. On January 15, 2008 they launched their affiliate network and within 5 1/2 months they have done the following:

• penetrated 17.5% of the market as per MarketingSherpa
• added 177 new advertisers, including eBay, NetQuote, Auto Parts Warehouse, FRS Health Energy, HomeGain, 1&1 Internet, VistaPrint, and Angie’s List
• signed partnership deal with M3 Mobile, an internet and mobile marketing network.

MarketingSherpa published a study in which Pepperjame Network has quickly positioned itself as one of the top 5 affiliate marketing networks in the United States. It is considered the most significant affiliate network launch of the last 10 years (Electronic Retailer Magazine, June 2008).

Over the past eight years the Pepperjam Network has provided consultation to hundreds of affiliates and merchants and therefore understand the business very well. They provide advertisers and publishers with resources and education to help optimized their affiliate marketing. Having the background of consulting firstly certainly helps Pepperjam identify affiliate network’s short comings.

They have identified two main points of weakness of competitors and are using these as competitive advantage -
(1) poor, unreliable communication tools
(2) lack of affiliate transparency.

The Pepperjam Network is that advertisers will be empowered to better manage brand and minimize fraud through full and unfettered affiliate transparency, while also building stronger, more strategic affiliate marketing relationships through real-time communication tools such as Pepperjam Chat.

So this seems to make sense on both sides. They are signing up a ton of good advertisers with the promise of serving them with tools to track their spending and measuring their success. And then in turn this is appealing for publishers because they will have a good stable of advertisers.

Now the true test is to see if they’ll sign up PurpleSquirrl.com even with its little amount of traffic. If they do I’ll report back later on its success.

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