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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Every girl wants a pony for Christmas…right? I absolutely love this commercial. It is not only hilarious, but it also successfully merges Verizon’s message with a humorous ad that is very memorable.

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.

I am on site this week with one of my consulting clients who is a merchant. Since I have been here, many things have come to light that really seemed to surprise this client. He is a smart and successful person who simply did not know some of the things relating to the affiliate marketing industry that I do and I simply figure that everyone knows about these things.

Many times I say something to the effect of, “My job is so easy that it is scary.” What I mean when I say this is that many things I do I consider second nature. Perhaps it is because I have been at this for a while that I consider these things to be simple and to be common knowledge.

When wearing my consultant hat, I have to admit that when I hear my clients refer to something I just educated them about as invaluable, it sends me back to my hotel room that night feeling good…like I have really earned my money for that day.

My point is that merchants, regardless of their size or importance, can always learn something good from a successful affiliate. These things will sometimes relate to their affiliate program, sometimes they will relate to their operation in general. Either way, a face-to-face between an informed consultant and a merchant who is willing to listen and learn will most always end up in a positive light with positive change resulting from such a session.

It is human nature to think we have control. Sometimes we have control and we become complacent and happy. An outside voice can usually shed some light on topics that the complacent ones could not see previously.

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!