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.

There are many products that I have tried promoting via PPC over the years. Some work well while others provide margins that are negative or so close that they are unacceptable. Of course, I move on from those items as I am not here to spend money unless a good ROI is involved.

Before this holiday season started I looked back through my Adwords account to see what items I had promoted over the past year that did not pay. I made a list of these items and those that were close to making money or barely in the positive, I re-activated for the holidays.

Much to my surprise (well, not really because I expected this) I am now making money on some of these same campaigns that were not successful at other times of the year. The fact is, people are scouring the web right now looking for things to buy. Many shoppers are wide open for suggestion or are simply looking for some guidance in purchasing gifts. I am guiding them along with a few extra PPC efforts that are now profitable.

So look through those old campaigns. Get the ones that were close out, dust them off and fire them back up. You might be surprise at the results. Of course, monitor them closely, especially if it is an item that can sell out, and also keep an eye on them once the holiday surge is over. You might want to pack them back up and put them away until November 2008.

Happy Selling!

A month or so back I made a connection that I new would be a good one. I bought an RV from a business that sells niche items related to RVs. They find themselves taking fifth-wheel trailers and motor homes in on trade from time to time.

In talking with the owner of the business, I found that he sees these as something he has to deal with and really would rather not worry about advertising and selling the trade-ins he gets. To that end, he has been selling these units at or below his investment in them just to get his money back out of them. While I really enjoyed the deal I got, I saw a need for someone to help him market these units because there was money being left on the table in these transactions.

After a short amount of discussion, we have made an arrangement for me to cover the marketing of these RVs for a revenue share. This is really no different than the affiliate model. He has the units for sale and I drive qualified customers to him. When the unit sells I am included in the profit.

While I will not go in to detail about my deal, I can safely say that there are many businesses in need of professional marketing services, many of them in your own neighborhood. I encourage those in the affiliate world to seek out these businesses and develop relationships with them. It can be a nice avenue of diversification.

Many affiliate networks now offer paid search management services. These services are paid for either in a percentage of the spend or on a performance basis. Because the network has such leverage in the merchant/affiliate relationship, they often misguide merchants as to how they should best work with affiliates in order to maximize their profits from managing the merchant’s paid search campaigns.
Often, policies like this arise from such misguidance

• Affiliates are not permitted to out bid FootSmart.com for placement on any search terms in the top tier search engines - Yahoo, MSN, and Google.

Now, let’s examine this. If I have a web site that promotes a night brace for those suffering from plantar fasciitis and I send that traffic to Footsmart, now I am being managed as to how much I can bid on that item. Even though I am sending that traffic to Footsmart, they are telling me that I must be below them on my bid. Keep in mind that bid does not equal ad placement, but that is another story all together.

So, now with Footsmart’s policy I have to send these sales elsewhere. If my site has a story or other compelling content on it that convinces this customer to buy the product, one would think that Footsmart would be very eager to get that click, but what happens is that when an affiliate network manages the merchant’s paid search they are protective to the point of, in this case, costing the merchant new customers.

Merchants, think long and hard before you meld your affiliate program with the management of your paid search. Many affiliates are able to largely outperform many merchants and network people in paid search. Why? Because we have tighter margins and we have to be better. Many good PPC affiliates offer paid search consulting services, including myself. So, before you risk running good affiliates out of your program consider your choices.

Another popular merchant who is feeling the effects of trademark poachers has revised search policies to eliminate the abuse.
So many affiliates reach only for the low-hanging fruit in this day and age and this really causes problems with companies. More to the point, if a company pays 5% commission to affiliates and realizes that 50% of their affiliate transactions add no value at all, it is very easy for them just to lower their commission and leave the value-add affiliates scratching their head and wondering why. That is the last thing that an affiliate wants is to be punished for the others who are not playing by the rules.
Thank you to those managing Kodak’s affiliate affairs for realizing the issue at hand and taking steps to fix it. We certainly need more of this in our industry.
Kodak is one of the most recognizable brands in the world and it would have been easy for them to go overboard in protecting their brand.
If you don’t have links up for Kodak, log in to CJ and get them. It’s a good program!

Over the past few months, I have seen an influx of affiliate managers and OPMs entering the affiliate arena as affiliates. While I have to say they have every right to do this, it concerns me when I see those whom I have shared information with that could now be used to compete with me.

I see a larger and larger number of affiliate managers complaining that affiliates are aloof, don’t enter the right sites or methods of promotion into network interfaces or some affiliates who use bogus email addresses and other ways of remaining invisible. Well, certainly this is not true in every case, but to these concerns that affiliate managers have, why would an affiliate share everything about their business with you when you are their competition?

In coming months I will be keeping my guard up when speaking with AMs whom I know are active affiliates. I will indeed shield as much information from these people as I can. I see a conflict when the AM has access to information such as your sites and your methods of driving traffic to them.

Am I saying never to trust an affiliate manger? No! What I am saying is that before you blindly trust someone and get them so involved in your business that they can see your methods and results, know what you are potentially getting yourself in to.

A week or two back, iFrogz sent out an email alerting affiliates that they no longer allow them to bid on their brand name in PPC search engines. They, as are so many other programs, were feeling the crunch from those poaching their trademark by paying commissions on sales that should not have been commissioned.

Earlier today they sent another email expressly disallowing affiliates to bid on “ifrogz coupons”, “ifrogz reviews” and other terms containing their name and long tail terms.

It always strikes me as funny when a merchant does this, because it does nothing to reduce affiliate commissions. All it does is hurt the PPC affiliate while those fortunate enough to be above the fold on these terms get all of the traffic. Amazingly enough, those sites are often not the best at representing the merchant and their brand in a professional light. I often see coupon sites in the top SERPS positions for a term with expired or invalid coupons.

Apparently, after some discussions, iFrogz saw the error of their ways and fixed this issue by lining out a specific set of terms regarding their trademark. They sent yet another email regarding the issue.

While I might consider three emails on the same topic in a week or two to be a bit much, KUDOS to iFrogz for fixing it and allowing their affiliates to grow with them and represent their fine company and their unique niche products.

If you have not tried the iFrogz program, give them a try. They convert well!

At the request of some, I am offering a site review service for merchants who either have an affiliate program or do not have one and are surveying the landscape in starting a program.

My review consists of a thorough 25-point evaluation on the web site, all of your policies, potential problems affiliates might have as well as a complete transaction (up to $25, including shipping) and a full analysis of the customer side of your site as far as the site itself, your post-transaction email communications and the fulfillment experience.

Many of my consulting clients are having me do this work twice a year or so. If you do not have a regular affiliate manager or an outsourced firm managing your program, or even if you do, an outside, unbiased eye on your operation is a good thing to have once in a while.

This service is $595** and the work commences within 2 business days of the order being placed with me (see payment links below) and is completed within a day or two of the time the test purchase arrives. The initial work is done, the order on your site is placed and the process is completed when the order arrives.

My credentials to do such an evaluation are listed below:

• I am a Super Affiliate with over 5 years in Affiliate Marketing
• I am a CJP (Commission Junction Performer). This represents me as in the top affiliates at Commission Junction in volume as well as in ethics.
• Named Affiliate of the Year by Affiliate Summit in January, 2006
• I attend many affiliate-related functions each year and keep a pulse on the affiliate marketing community
• I have been involved in online commerce full-time since 1998. This includes launching a commerce site from the ground up in 1999 as well as several other sites that were launched and later sold.
• Was featured in Revenue Magazine in 2006.

If you have any questions at all, please contact me.

What they’re saying about this service:

- Randy Stocklin - One Click Ventures LLC

“Scott’s review was extremely thorough. It covered everything from site navigation to checkout to order fulfillment. Many of Scott’s suggestions were easy-to-implement tweaks that did not require expensive design or programming costs.

We implemented Scott’s suggestions in Q3 of 2007. We saw a significant increase in our conversion rate after we made the changes. Our 2007 holiday season was our best to date. We can’t thank Scott enough. He is worth every penny and more!”

- Melissa C. Murphy - CrazyForBargains.com

My intention is not to manage your affiliate program or your web site. From time to time a trained outside eye can help your business. In a startup environment this kind of third-party evaluation is a must. I really enjoy analyzing a web site or an affiliate program and finding ways to make them better and more productive. I have done this for a long time now and know what to look for from the affiliate perspective as well as from the consumer perspective.

Use the button below to sign up, then contact me via email upon completion. I will be in touch to discuss my services and answer any questions before I get started. The charge will post as Brightside Media Inc. on your statement.

Use PayPal or Google Checkout for payment.

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** - This is an introductory price for the service and is subject to increase.

When I started Cooperative Affiliates Inc., I sold shares of stock to investors and used that capitol to get things rolling. This was just as much an experiment as it was anything else.

I am happy to announce that as of August 31, 2007, I am the sole stockholder of Cooperative Affiliates. All shares were purchased back and my investors enjoyed a very real 37% + gain on their money in less than a year’s time. This made me happy to see that this model can work in the affiliate environment. It also made me happy to cut those checks because the people I cut them to trusted in me and were well rewarded for their contribution.

Here’s to the future of Affiliate Marketing and online commerce in general.

Scott Hazard

In the past several months my business has started to take a new direction. For a lack of another term, I call it Reality Marketing. I will explain.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a passion for Bass Fishing. I moved to the area where I now live to be near Lake Fork, one of the best Bass fishing lakes in the US. I have started a blog site detailing my experiences and showing the fish I am catching, where I am catching them and what I am catching them on. I monetize this site in numerous ways.

• Product Recomendations - My site shows lures that I am catching fish on and I put links to these certain lures in the content of my site. These links perform rather well.
• Adsense - I have laced my site with Google Adsense ads. These are contextual ads that show relevant ads.
• Product Sales - I offer two products for sale on the site, the best selling being a detailed map of Lake Fork. At this time, the map and the Adsense ads are the main revenue producers.

As time goes by, I will have more of these Reality Marketing sites. They will include a blog for my two Standard Poodles that features dog and pet related items, advice, information and other useful content. I have many other projects similar to this planned.

What better way can there be to market an item or a related group of items than to share my own experiences and preferences using a site with content that comes straight from my life? I see a new model developing for me in Reality Marketing.