It seems that in the AM world there are multiple movements to organize and form an entity to take on industry issues. So far, from what I can see, this appears to be similar to herding cats. On one side we have a section of those within our industry who want to include all facets of the industry equally and on the other side we have a movement to make such an organization completely affiliate-centric.
From what I see and based on the history of the Affiliate Marketing industry, there will likely be very little progress on this front for a long, long time. In an industry made up of completely independent entities, many of whom completely conceal their identity, the transparency necessary for any such organization to take hold and grow some “teeth” is just not there. A trade organization must have a board and the members of such board must be visible to the members of the organization.
Even then, the organization must have a broad base of membership across the various facets of the industry in order to serve its members. I just don’t see a board made up of the needed variables within the industry being able to form and stick together for long enough to gain the momentum needed to effect changes in the industry.
Over the past weeks I have received several calls and emails regarding this and I am simply sitting back watching the events unfold. So far the infighting and name calling has been humorous to say the very least. I sincerely hope that the differences between the two sides can be ironed out and some sort of industry association can emerge, but with the vast differences in principal concepts I see, I am not holding my breath on such an occurrence.

I have had several email conversations and several phone conversations lately as to why there seems to be an exodus of merchants in the affiliate marketing world. In the past few months, Vermont Country Store, Fun to Collect and several other merchants who have been in the affiliate marketing arena for some time have exited.
Some of these merchants have cited trademark abuse and their inability to control it as a reason for leaving affiliate marketing. I see this as a frightening trend that will only get worse unless this problem is brought under control.

Here is the problem as I see it. A merchant enters the space with a new affiliate program and the management of the program is placed in the lap of someone in the marketing department. This person is told to create banners, text links and other similar materials for affiliates to place on their web sites. Meanwhile, they are auto-approving affiliates because it takes too long to manually approve them and those who do nothing but bid on the merchant’s domain name show up, fleece the merchant out of thousands of dollars and the merchant never even knows what hit them. All they know is that they have this pool of affiliates now standing between them and a customer who was looking for them by name. They find one affiliate who is doing this, remove them and there are 10 more in line with their Adwords account cocked and ready to do the very same thing.

Meanwhile, the merchant might or might not have gotten a brief education on the perils of trademark abuse from the network when they signed up for their affiliate program. The merchant certainly did not enter the affiliate marketing space knowing that they would have to dedicate someone to police their affiliates. Furthermore, they probably did not bother to set terms forbidding this practice when they set up their affiliate program. Why did they not do this? Because they had no clue that it was necessary.
The bottom line is that we have networks making huge stacks of money from this valueless proposition to the merchant and affiliates who know better, but just can’t seem to stop because the money is so good. The networks and the offending affiliates are the very first people in line to blame the merchant for not disallowing the practice. My question is how did the merchant know this would be such a large problem? They signed up to have affiliates promote their products and/or services, not to have affiliates bidding on their domain name and tricking the customer in to clicking an ad to get to the merchant’s web site. It is truly a mess.

Are affiliate managers and OPMs to blame? Maybe so. If they did not take the time to educate their clients about this abuse, then they are indeed at least partially to blame. Those affiliate managers who have clients who implicitly disallow trademark bidding yet still allow it are criminal in my opinion. Most affiliate managers and OPMs seem pretty responsible, but there are a few out there that blatantly disregard the will of their client in the name of a dollar. This will stop soon enough, when their clients realize they they are being fleeced and file huge law suits against the rogue managers.

Are the networks to blame? Let’s follow the money on that one. If a network has 2000 merchant clients and 1500 of them are being abused by affiliates poaching their domain name, who is making the real money here? Yep, the networks are making huge amounts of money from this activity.

Is auto-approve to blame? In a word….YES! If an affiliate can join an affiliate program with nobody performing any vetting at all of that affiliate and their operation, auto-approve only fuels the fire. It has been my contention for some time that auto-approve is to blame for much of the abuse in the affiliate marketing industry today.

In conclusion, there is no simple answer to this problem. Merchants need to be educated. Networks need to take at least some steps to alert new merchants of the potential of abuse. Granted, if a merchant is brand new, has no traffic and an Alexa rating of 4,387,987 then their domain name will likely not be a big payday for a trademark poacher. But merchants who already have an existing base of customers and traffic need to be educated and I say that it is the network’s responsibility to do that. They are the one who profits from every single sale. They are the one who have the fiduciary duty to both the merchant and the affiliates.

By the way, kudos to the Avantlink network for recognizing this problem and addressing it in their generic affiliate terms. If the others would follow suit, the affiliate marketing industry would be a healthier place to do business for everyone.

It was several months back that I signed up for Lifelock.com, a service that is designed to protect your identity and comes with a written $1M guarantee. After hearing many commercials on XM radio and seeing their ads plastered all over TV and print, I took a closer look at Lifelock.
What LifeLock does is very simple. They issue fraud alerts in your name to all credit bureaus and they also arrange for a copy of your credit reports to sent to you on a regular basis. They readily admit on their web site that a consumer can do this on their own, but LifeLock has the process automated and also offers an undeniable $1M guarantee to cover expenses or any costs relating to the identity of any LifeLock.com customer’s identity being stolen.
In today’s world of online commerce and not always knowing who is on the other end of a given transaction, I find comfort in LifeLock’s service and it is comfort that I am very happy to pay only about 30 cents a day for.
It was well after I signed up with LifeLock and was activated and had already seen the benefits start, like a marked decrease in the amount of junk mail and credit card offers I got, that I discovered their affiliate program. The program offers a generous referral fee and they offer a great coupon. The LifeLock.com coupon offer is simple. Instead of the customer paying $10 a month for the service, they pay only $9 a month. While this is not a huge deal on the front end, it is an ongoing, recurring coupon offer you can offer your customers on the LifeLock service.
I can honestly say that I was a LifeLock customer before I was an active LifeLock affiliate and I sincerely believe in the value that LifeLock offers to both its customers and its affiliates.
To get the recurring 10% off deal from LifeLock.com, click here.

Every day I see more and more affiliates entering or making plans to enter the ranks of Affiliate Mangers or OPMs. The trend I see is that many of these affiliates are ones who have struggled and never really were able to make ends meet in the affiliate world.
If you are a merchant or even an agency and are looking to hire someone as an AM or OPM, you need to ask yourself a few things about this individual. I have laid out some questions that I would ask this individual below, along with some of my thoughts regarding the answers you might get to these questions.
How long did you make a living as an affiliate marketer? - In my opinion, anyone who worked as an affiliate for less than a year then decided they needed to get in to management is taking too large of a step and simply following what they see as a money trail. This person likely does not have the “sticktuitiveness” to be an effective AM/OPM.
How much did you earn in profits as an affiliate? - The key word here is PROFIT. Anyone can spend a ton on PPC and make a $50 profit or even produce a $50 loss. It takes talent for someone to consistently make a decent living as an affiliate marketer. In my eyes, anyone who makes a good living as an affiliate marketer has no motivation to become an AM or OPM. I guess some people really have an innate desire to work with others and teach, but the affiliate mindset is largely one of being a lone wolf and not wanting to depend on others for a level of success. An AM or OPM depend on both merchants and affiliates for their success.
Was your affiliate marketing income your only source of income? - There is a BIG difference in making a living at affiliate marketing and working at affiliate marketing while your wife or husband is off working to support you and the family. Very few achieve the consistency in affiliate marketing that is needed to rely on it to support your family. There is a big difference in the mindset when one is doing something as a means of supporting the household and doing it for a second income.
What will you do with your affiliate ventures as an AM/OPM? - Anyone who answers this question with something like, “I will unplug those sites and let the domains expire” shows clearly that they did not build a sustainable business as an affiliate. Why on earth would an affiliate flush sites that get traffic and make money. Furthermore, be weary of an answer like, “I am going to keep them, they make too much money to stop them.” Affiliates are more and more distrustful of managers who are also affiliates…and rightly so. Managers have access to information that they can use to compete with their affiliates if the manager is also an affiliate on the side.

The bottom line is that there is a plethora of people out there calling themselves an affiliate manager or an OPM who have no clue how the affiliate marketing world really works. I see them every week. It wasn’t that long ago that I spoke with someone who has a reputation as a seasoned OPM who had no idea how to calculate a conversion ratio. I was shocked to find this out, but not surprised that there are many such people who use forums and other means to make themselves look much more seasoned and generally much smarter than they really are.

Select your candidates carefully and make sure your affiliate manager understands at least moderate marketing concepts, metrics and, most importantly in my opinion, has the experience as a successful affiliate marketer to be able to connect with affiliates and understand affiliate-related issues. Your affiliate manager is the link between your business and those individuals and companies who can ad substantial results to your bottom line.

In three words that total only 9 letters, “I THINK NOT”.
As you probably know by now, Pepperjam recently started an affiliate marketing network. Read for yourself how CJ acted terribly unprofessionally (at best) and possibly very illegally in attempting to interfere with Pepperjam and their management clients. They waited for a day when they knew PJ management would be busy for their ambush.

Why don’t I think CJ should be trusted? CJ is always the first to do something that causes affiliates problems or stress and benefits CJ. Three letters… LMI. I have been in touch with an associate affiliate manager for a major CJ merchant recently who told me “CJ put so much pressure on us to try them (speaking of parasitic adware affiliates in a program that had never allowed them in) that we gave in and tried them.” This was a program that was a haven for value-add affiliates and it has all but dried up now and the only people making money there are couponers, trademark poachers and of course the parasites. CJ got involved in managing this program less than a year ago and has already taken it from being a program where affiliates could make money to now being a program where mostly CJ makes money while the number of incremental sales to this merchant have no doubt fallen dramatically.

They have also convinced merchants to make policy changes in their programs that clearly benefit their own affiliate marketing operation. I have been told this by a merchant as well. Special deals between merchants and CJ’s affiliate marketing efforts are being made inside the company. CJ has the data to know which programs convert the best and how affiliates are maximizing their volume in a given program. What a fantastic source of information with which to fuel your own affiliate marketing efforts…unless you are supposed to be….uhhhhh….a TRUSTED THIRD PARTY!!!

Let’s talk about tools for affiliates. Linkshare, Performics, Shareasale, Avantlink, Pepperjam Network and most other affiliate networks have tools that allow affiliates to do everything from manage datafeed subscriptions, create page templates and many other tools that make affiliate marketing easy and/or productive for affiliates. CJ does not even have a consolidated way of disseminating coupons to affiliates that I am aware of. Most coupons listed in their interface are lacking an expiration date. They have no tools and offer affiliates no reason to work with them. It’s almost like they just don’t give a rat’s ass about affiliates. You have to submit their AAQ to get merchant feeds removed or added. If you are lucky enough to have an account rep, the process is still pitifully slow and subject to misinterpretation because it involves someone at CJ communicating with another on your behalf. If CJ really wanted to offer affiliates some value, they would have fixed this system long ago. It has been brought to their attention on every level by myself and hundreds of others but they lend a deaf ear to such requests.

Getting back to their assault on Pepperjam, who has been a partner with CJ for many years, is CJ trying to bully PJ’s clients any different than their program managers influencing a merchant to behave in a way that benefits CJ’s affiliate marketing operation? Not really. It is that “blind hog at the trough” mindset. Do whatever you have to do to advance yourself even if that means acting in unethical, illegal and downright crooked ways to accomplish your goal. This is a pattern that CJ has replicated over and over and over again. They fired or allowed many of their best employees to quit when they made a big deal over not wanting employees to be affiliates because it is a conflict of interest. Not two years later they purchased affiliate sites and are now aggressive in their own affiliate marketing operation and leveraging their relationship with the merchants, a relationship that gained by acting as a “Trusted Third Party”, to unfairly compete with the affiliates who are responsible for their existence.

Every affiliate I talk to, every affiliate consulting client I have, every merchant I get to have a chat with all eventually ask me about my network preference. Immediately after that they ask about a negative network preference. While the jury is still out on my favorite network, CJ has landed the latter of the two categories by a huge margin over the past two years.

“So, Scott, Pepperjam is an affiliate too. Why don’t you mention that?” Good point. It is true. Pepperjam is an affiliate, a management firm and a network, as is CJ, LinkShare, Performics and others. There are countless affiliate management firms out there who are also aggressive affiliates. This seems to be the direction the industry is going. What we must now base our opinions on are tools, visibility, reputation and the ability to contact someone at a given network who A) gives a damn and B) will actually listen and make an earnest attempt to reach a resolution…or at least offer a candid explanation as to why they think the issue you raised does not warrant such. I can reach someone at PJN who at least appears to give a damn. All I can reach at CJ is an account rep who only replies to about half of my emails and if there is ever a sense that I am upset about something, intentionally ignores me.

Is Pepperjam perfect? NO! Do they meet my needs as a network better than CJ does? Absolutely! Will they some day pull the same crap that CJ has in pushing policy changes that benefit them and hurt other affiliates? Maybe, but until then I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I suggest you check out Pepperjam Network. For a network that is less than 3 months old, they have an impressive collection of merchants, tools and support resources!

Five years ago I would have sworn this day would never come, but with the new version of Windows (Vista) now the only game in town for my PC and the option of upgrading PCs forced to include Vista, it is time to leave the PC all together and use a Mac. I have used Vista to some degree and I just don’t like it.

I have spent countless hours reading, researching and learning all I can about the Mac and its OS. The nuances and quirks of the Mac seem manageable and the upside of making this switch is that I will not have to deal with new operating systems from MS that complicate things and force me to upgrade nor will I be a slave to McAfee and Norton et al in that I am forced to buy their products or face the wrath of viruses and spyware. The rogue software has spawned its own protection racket and MS doesn’t appear to be worried about it.

After a bad experience with the Apple store at Northpark Mall in Dallas, I have decided to purchase my Macbook and my iMac from Vanns.com. Vanns is a great electronics store. They have good prices, charge no sales tax at all and from the affiliate side, their tracking works like a charm. I have worked with the Vanns.com Affiliate Program for a few years now and it is one of my favorites. I know the people who run it and they are top notch. I am happy anytime I am able to buy from Vanns.

Look for more details and information about the switch from PC to Mac on my new blog (launching soon) FromPCtoMac.com.

What I’m Getting:
The main work computer will be a 24″ iMac 2.4 ghz. From what I have read online, the increase in the processor to the 2.8 model is only realized under intensive CPU usage such as gaming or running Autocad or similar applications. I think for my videos and web design purposes the 2.4 will do.
The mobile machine is going to be the base model Macbook. My PC laptop is similar in specs. I don’t require much from the laptop. I can always upgrade RAM on these machines later if needed.

Remember the days when you could upload content that was spidered and getting great traffic in a fews days time? As Carol Oconnor and Jean Stapleton sang “Those were the days!” A few sites still enjoy that kind of status these days, but not many.

I got an email recently from an affiliate manager speaking of “hitting the ground running.” I didn’t say it but my first thought was that hitting the ground running is pretty much not possible in the affiliate marketing world. SERPS take time to gain steam. Even a thorough PPC campaign is an ongoing project for months (for large projects) sometimes before optimization can be achieved on a large scale. To me, hitting the ground running makes me think of hours or a day at most before results start rolling in.

While there have been projects in the past with small numbers of keywords for PPC, the majority of my PPC campaigns took some time before the keywords, both positive and negative, and ad copy were what I call completely in sync and reaching who they need to reach. Some of these campaigns I have been tweaking for a year or more. We all find the gem now and then that is a really cool site that sells one thing in one color and has little or no competition. The market dictates that such an occurrence will not last long.

Don’t sell yourself short on your ability to produce results quickly if you are a PPC marketer. But at the same time don’t think you are killin’ it if you start making positive results right off the bat. Well targeted PPC can drive instant results. On items where search volume is low and margins are good, it often takes time to find a way to make it work but it can be done.

This particular manager was not pushing, they were only using a phrase we all use. It just made me think about how things are and how they once were.

As I was cruising my merchants’ site this morning looking to see who had the best post-holiday deals, I took a look at LandofNod.com. They are currently running a good sale with up to 35% off many of their products. While not heavy on coupons, LandofNod.com has a strong affiliate program with strong numbers. When they have a sale, it is worth promoting.

They sell a really nice mix of children’s furniture and most anything else people who have one or more children will need sooner or later. In my test purchase with them, I found their fulfillment to be outstanding in time of arrival, packaging and throughout the checkout process.

We are relatively new to the LandofNod program. We met them at Shareasale Think Tank in November and have been anxious to get started with them since then.

See all LandofNod.com coupons and deals.

Update 02-02-08-2008
Since the original post has been made regarding LandofNod.com, they have opened a parallel program at CJ and now have every cookie-stuffing adware affiliate under the sun in their affiliate program. I have notified my affiliate consulting clients of this because this was a program I told them to look at. Now it is just another affiliate program where you drive traffic to the merchant and there is a good chance that it will be diverted to another affiliate through an adware application.
Why merchants do this is completely beyond me. It is not hard to see that the adware applications monetize traffic the merchant has gained on their own or traffic that other affiliates have sent them. If you are one of my consulting clients, forget that I ever recommended LandofNod.com to you, especially if you are spending money driving traffic to their web site.
Are they still worth promoting? Yes. Their site is great and their product mix is unique, clean and well-thought-out, but be very careful as this is not a completely affiliate-friendly web site any longer.

More and more quality web sites are featuring Google Adsense on their sites now. A crafty affiliate can leverage this into some affordable traffic.

Now calling it “Placement Targeting”, Google allows you to actually search for a site, a category and several other ways to find relevant sites with the Adsense ads you can target.

This traffic is not as targeted as keyword-based traffic, but it can add substantially to your bottom line if it is used correctly. Gone are the days of having to weed through hundreds of sites in order to find sites to target. Google makes this easy and setting up such a campaign is simple and takes very little time.

Check out Placement Targeting today and get your share of inexpensive traffic!

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The Holidays are over, many Americans have spent a lot of money on gifts and Holiday parties etc.. It seems like the mindset most consumers get in after the Holidays is a mindset of looking for big discounts and coupons for their favorite stores.

In past years, I have seen conversions actually increase in some instances after the Holiday shopping frenzy. This happens on merchants who offer the deep discounts and large coupons on the inventory they did not sell over the fourth quarter.

For instance, iFrogz.com offered 40% off all purchases from December 25 to January 1. Stack this with the 15% off coupon available at CouponPouch.com and you save 55% on any order. That was enough to trigger me to order an iFrogz skin for all of the iPods in the house.

Another good example is Lids.com offering a 20% off coupon on orders over $75 plus free ground shipping. This is indeed a great offer with the NCAA Bowl season in full force.

Keep an eye out for these special deals. They usually last throughout the month of January and are often one of the best promotions of the year for some of your best merchant partners.