Purple Squirrl

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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