Associate Programs Newsletter #183
Wayne Porter, the guest expert who wrote today’s article on super affiliates, refers to affiliates who earn $2,000 to $10,000 a month as “emerging affiliates”.
Wayne is Vice-President of Product Development at AffTrack, which tracked more than $90 million in affiliate sales in February.
If you’re an “emerging affiliate”, today’s article may encourage you to investigate the next step.
CONTENTS:
1. Beware of the small print with .USA domain names
2. Super affiliates – PART 1
Future affiliate models and how they work
3. CarPrices.com keeps paying its top affiliates
4. SmartShop fails to pay money owed
5. Amazon’s author scheme a “sick joke”
6. Frames and IE 6 don’t always mix well
7. Outpost completes merger
8. Overture results appearing at Yahoo!
9. Useful free resource: E-mail discussion lists
10. G’day mate – I’m an Aussie
11. Thought for today: A helping hand
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1. Beware of the small print with .USA domain names
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I received spam from dotusa.com the other day saying: “The latest domain name extension has arrived .USA!!!”
If you’re thinking of buying one of these, beware. Read the FAQ first. It says:
“The .USA domain names are currently being registered for activation in 2002. They will initially be viewed on the Internet by making a slight alteration to your web browser.”
In other words, you can’t actually use the domain name this year, and people who don’t make that “slight alteration” to their browsers won’t see your web site.
The company is probably hoping you’ll confuse .USA and .US.
(.US web domains are expected to go on sale in the first half of
2002. Details: newsbytes.com/news/01/171604.html )
The .USA spam I received, addressed to no one and with no one’s name on it, was sent to an old e-mail address that I haven’t used for years.
Don’t buy anything from spammers. Don’t promote spammers.
Dotusa.com company has an affiliate program. Don’t wreck your reputation by promoting it.
(Another small step towards making the Internet a cleaner place.)
[UPDATE: Dotusa died.]============================================
2. Super affiliates – PART 1
Future affiliate models and how they work
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By Wayne Porter, V.P. Product Development, AffTrack
There has been a lot of talk about affiliate marketing and where it is going in the future. At AffTrack we have identified several models that we feel are going to be prominent as e-commerce matures and affiliate marketing becomes more sophisticated.
These models are popular among many super affiliates and large merchants but the principles can be applied to affiliates of any size.
Currently the most basic permutation of affiliate marketing is one of simple linking and filling banner inventory with revenue sharing banners. This is only the first step in the revenue sharing equation.
The more advanced models are capable of delivering a lot more in terms of sales and actually can add value to a site.
The first model is “Collaborative Commerce”. There are a number of forms of collaborative commerce but this most commonly refers to a method of e-commerce occurring when a merchant and an affiliate become deeply “partnered”.
This is very similar to a private label site with a distinct exception – the sites are so blended it is hard to discern which site you’re on. Usually the publisher wraps content around the products and the user can navigate to both the publisher and the merchant site’s with a few simple clicks. Co-branding is the most basic form of this model.
A good example of collaborative commerce is the deal between https://www.Gorp.com and https://www.Orvis.com – you will see they are highly married with content and products. It’s a very sweet concept.
Another popular model is “Syndicated Retailing”. As the name implies the merchant is pushing products directly to the affiliate site.
In this form of syndication the affiliate or publisher does little beyond providing the space for the merchant to do the job of product presentation, pitch and value proposition. This is becoming more common with large portals but we are seeing it more and more with niche sites or content properties.
The next model is a more advanced version of the “mini-site”. We call them “Socket Sites” because they plug directly into the affiliate’s existing traffic stream as an external site.
Affiliates who drive large volumes of sales are graduated to their own private label business. With this site they have the ability to launch their own affiliate programs, use telephone marketing, and other merchant marketing techniques. Naturally there has to be a strong affinity between the core site and the socket site.
“Post Transaction Selling” is a rather new but growing area of affiliate marketing. This form of merchant cross-pollination is an excellent way for merchants to participate in revenue sharing deals. With this technique they don’t compromise the need to optimize their sites for affiliate sales because this occurs after the customer has made the purchase.
With post transaction deals merchants are actually becoming affiliates by monetizing the dead space that occurs after purchase. The prospect is hot, they have just made a purchase and there is a good a chance they will make another purchase if a solid and related value proposition is made.
Finally there is the growing momentum in the field of “Convergent Marketing”. Networks and merchants are coming up with more sophisticated tracking mechanisms that can track sales across channels.
This is also a good way for those who sell and ship a physical product to tap into additional revenue. Imagine this scenario. You sell a computer product. In exchange for another site using their post-transaction space for your product you agree to include specially coded coupon mailers for that merchant when you ship out the products.
This is a great way to bump up extra revenue and generate sales across channels.
COMING SOON: In Part 2, Scott McNulty, CEO of AffTrack, will be talking about metrics, data and how large affiliates are looking at their numbers to make decisions about their business.
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3. CarPrices.com keeps paying its top affiliates
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CarPrices.com, which has been the subject of numerous complaints about non-payment of affiliate commissions, is still paying SOME affiliates.
“They are still paying us on time, probably because we are in their top 10 affiliate category,” says super affiliate Jeff Ostroff of https://www.CarBuyingTips.com .
“I noticed recently it appears they are still massaging their business plan,” Jeff says. “On the co-branded page we have with them at https://CarBuyingTips.carprices.com they have lessened most of the other services and pretty much just route you into the car buying form, which I assume is their most lucrative form.
“Their business plan shares money with the affiliates for car loans that are funded, free car quotes that are requested, insurance quotes requested, etc. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they continue to pay us.”
In September, Nikki Atchison of CarPrices.com said the company was still paying affiliates.
“We are using a prioritization method of doing payouts at this point in time due to the challenges we are all experiencing. All of our partners will be paid in due time and we thank them for their patience,” she said.
Jeff recommends that if an affiliate merchant stops paying you, remove it from your site.
“It’s nothing against the company, but you can’t afford to pay for traffic to your site and not get paid to send it to the affiliate sites.
“Luckily we removed eToys months before they closed when I ‘sensed a force’, as Darth Vader once said.
“The only company that ever came back to pay us what they owed was Coolsavings in August or September, when they owed their affiliates for six months back. We were about to remove their links when they sent us an e-mail about getting several million in funding, which opened up their ability to pay us all. That was great, and shows how honorable Coolsavings is.”
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4. SmartShop fails to pay money owed
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SmartShop.com has failed to pay commissions owed for six months, says Nadeem Azam of Litmania.com – https://www.Litmania.com .
“In the last two months we have written about 20 e-mails to them… We have tried numerous e-mail addresses listed on their site and not a single one has been responded to.”
In Nadeem’s experience, comparison shopping sites generally treat affiliates badly. Earlier this year, after scores of e-mails, he successfully took DealTime to court to get payment.
“For an entire week now, I have been trying to get in touch with the venture capitalists who funded SmartShop. Despite over 15 phone calls, they neither pick up the call nor respond to the numerous messages I’ve left on their answering system. Of course, this company, ZeroStage.com, also don’t respond to my e-mails. I e-mailed about 20 different people in the company and not ONE of them responded!
“It just makes me so angry.”
Nadeem says Litmania.com has lost thousands of dollars through non-payment by affiliate merchants.
“Affiliates have preciously few rights in this game, which is full of unscrupulous companies. They use the anonymity of email communication to avoid acting honorably.”
He says affiliates shouldn’t need to have a full-time lawyer working alongside them to ensure they get paid their “wages”.
An email I sent SmartShop seeking comment received an automatic reply which included no useful information.
Beware of SmartShop.
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5. Amazon’s author scheme a “sick joke”
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Author John May is totally disillusioned with Amazon.com’s scheme to help authors. He says it’s cynical and misleading.
John writes:
“You are right about Amazon.
“One point you may not be aware of that you might wish to bring to a wider audience.
“Amazon used to make much of the fact that authors could promote their work via the affiliate program. With the ‘diversion’ screen they introduced at the beginning of the year that’s a sick joke.
“Authors are better off avoiding the affiliate program altogether. Here is why:
“I woke up one morning in January and found to my horror that the direct link to my ‘Get The Edge At Blackjack’ book now contained dozens of links to my competitors’ books. This had been going on for weeks and amazon never bothered notifying me.
“My quarterly sales reflected the fact that I was now selling more of the oppositions’ material than my own. This is in a fiercely competitive market.
“Furthermore, while my field has a hard core of respectable and successful gambling authors, it’s also a fertile breeding ground for charlatans and hucksters, whose books my customers were now being directed to, damaging my extremely hard-won credibility by association.
“The only means of combating the diversion screen as far as authors are concerned is to forego the affiliate program altogether and simply link directly to the books. Once I did this my sales went back up again, and I made more in increased royalties from this approach than I would have done sticking with the affiliate program.
“Note that this approach increased the sales ranking of my book and the number of hits, which in turn increases the ranking of the book in the Amazon search engine and the number of reviews (a circular effect as reviews boost sales and rankings by themselves). This creates an important ‘compound interest’ effect.
“Amazon’s current policy towards authors is to my mind, cynical and deliberately misleading.”
John May.
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6. Frames and IE 6 don’t always mix well
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Here’s a tip from LinkShare for any affiliates who display merchant sites within frames.
“As an affiliate, if you use frames on your web site to display a merchant’s site, you should make sure that your merchants are IE 6 compliant. When you use frames on your web site, the merchant’s return day cookies become third party cookies and are blocked, unless the merchant is IE 6 compliant. This is true regardless of the affiliate program provider.”
LinkShare is urging all its merchants to become IE 6 compliant.
“LinkShare does not use cookies to track direct sales, so we are compliant with IE 6 in terms of our tracking,” LinkShare has told its affiliates.
If you’re planning to display a merchant within frames, check the affiliate agreement first. Some merchants don’t allow frames to be used that way.
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7. Outpost completes merger
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Outpost.com has announced the completion of its cash merger with Fry’s Electronics. Fry’s operates electronics stores in Texas, California, Arizona and Oregon.
internetnews.com/ec-news/article/0,,4_920541,00.html
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8. Overture results appearing at Yahoo!
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Overture (GoTo) has signed an agreement to become the pay-for- performance search provider to Yahoo!
Users who conduct searches at https://www.yahoo.com will see search results that include Overture’s top three search listings at the top of the page in a section called “Sponsor Matches.” Users will also see two Overture listings at the bottom of the page in a section called “More Sponsor Matches.” This agreement will be implemented over the next two weeks, beginning today.
So if you’re listed in the top three at Overture, expect to a surge in traffic.
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9. Useful free resource: E-mail discussion lists
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“You’re missing out on one of the Internet’s best kept secrets as far as resources go if you don’t make time for e-mail discussion lists,” says Adam Boettiger, who subscribes to 67 of them. “…as resources, these lists can save you a ton of time…”
Full story:
“Mindshare vs. Overload: How to manage high volume discussion list email”:
email911.com/articles/discussionlists.shtml
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10. G’day mate – I’m an Aussie
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I’ve been called an Australian so many times I’ve lost count.
From now on I really AM an Australian and I have a certificate to prove it. Joanna and I gained Australian citizenship this week.
We have dual citizenship. So if you call us New Zealanders or Australians, you’ll be right.
By the time you receive this, we’ll be in Auckland, New Zealand, on our way to Dunedin, where we usually spend each southern summer with friends and family.
I’ll take a break next week – Thursday is Thanksgiving Day.
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11. Thought for today: A helping hand
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“The best helping hand I ever got was at the end of my own arm.” – author unknown.
All the best
Allan Gardyne
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