Art of Tea Video Presentation

Dave has put together a great presentation of the Art of Tea affiliate program in a video, check it out here :

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Affiliate Marketing and Appealing to Different World Views

Everything a person looks at, experiences or examines gets filtered through a specific world view. Seth Godin, in his book All Marketers are Liars emphasizes this issue (among other things) as a key point in crafting stories or messages that will appeal to potential customers. One of the key themes in the book, is that merchants should not try and appeal to a multitude of world views, or else they risk their message becoming too diluted, unfocused and generic.

Affiliate marketing can be a valuable tool in expanding a merchants reach to different types of customers with different world views. Just on the surface, consider that couponers know their visitors are hunting for discounts and deals, forums know their customers have in-depth interest in particular niches', and content/blog sites will of course appeal to various niche interests.  Recruiting different types of quality affiliates to an affiliate program allows a merchant to touch these potential customers, through the affiliate partners that they might not never have been able to reach when focusing on their core customer's world view.

For example, consider a trendy woman's fashion merchant. Logic would dictate they this merchant would craft their message to their core customer segment, woman interested in trendy fashions. Now, suppose we have a webmaster who runs a blog with a community of married men who are computer enthusiasts (aka nerds) (note: I would definitely be a member of this community). Right before Christmas time, these men are desperate and searching for advice and tips on gifts to buy their wives/significant others. The blog owner signs up for the woman's trendy fashion affiliate program, and offers this merchant up to his community. Just like that, the trendy woman's fashion site gets exposed to a group of men who wouldn't ordinarily be visiting this site, and who are looking for things to purchase.

Among the advantages of CPA marketing; measurable and clear ROI, it's important not to neglect the huge advantage of expanding the merchant reach to customers not ordinarily exposed to a merchant. Good affiliate managers will be on the look out for these types of affiliates and will be actively recruiting them into a program.

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Affiliate Marketing: Outsourcing (OPMs) is More Cost Effective Than Hiring In-House

According to Shawn Collin's Affstat Report the average salary for an in-house manager is $50,000 a year and up. Now, factor in health and other benefits, desk space, infrastructure, those costs rise significantly. To support an in-house affiliate manager, a business must plan to spend at least $70,000 - $90,000 in overhead. If the in-house manager decides to leave the company, all of the knowledge and the relationship history usually walks out the door with the manager.

Additionally, it may be difficult to find an experienced affiliate manager within a specific geographical area. Some larger organizations leave the affiliate program in the care of a junior level marketing staffer. This can be a mistake with lasting consequences. A well run affiliate program can be responsible for 10-20% or more of overall company revenue. Likewise, with the advantages of added revenue and reach, there are dangers in not carefully managing an affiliate program. Brand messages may be damaged and revenue from other channels pillaged via malware and parasiteware.

Most OPM firms charge either a flat fee plus revenue share, or at least a monthly minimum revenue share. Generally the monthly minimum of flat fee is between $2000-$5000 a month.

Now also consider the other benefits an OPM brings: experience, relationships, knowledge, and stability. An OPM has established working relationships with many if not all of the top performing affiliates. They've built a history of performance, and generally an affiliate will know the style of any certain OPM such as does the OPM have a stance against parasiteware, or are they accessible?

In relation to the experience benefits, the cost savings strongly favor an advantage to outsourcing an affiliate program. Focus on the business, do what you do best, and leave the success and growth of a well-managed experience program to experts who are focused on growing your business.

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2007 AMWSO Year in Review

2007 was a year of innovation and evolution for AMWSO, and especially toward the end of the year, the door was opened for some exciting developments and opportunities in 2008.

In 2007 we launched over 10 new programs, including Baghaus, Ecampus, Sonoma Diet, Jillian Michaels, along with several more. We had great success with these launches along with the affiliates who joined up and started promoting them. We helped Ecampus have their best year ever during the back to school season, and we helped Baghaus spread their brand and become a premier handbag focused merchant. Diet season is starting right now, and we have primed our diet and fitness programs for affiliate to reap the whirlwind in January and February.

We had tremendous success in regard to innovations using affiliate videos with the Gaiam program. Our client Gaiam won the prestigious 2007 LinkShare Golden Link "Innovative Merchant Of The Year" Award due to affiliate trackable video files that we helped introduce.

We also met with some challenges in 2007. One particular program that we launched for an air filtration and water filtration system proved very challenging. We learned that having an outstanding product was not enough to make a program successful. Brand marketing support is needed along with an affiliate program, so that not only the public learns about a product, but the affiliates become more familiar as well. All of the cogs connect when building a successful affiliate program, including paid search initiatives, natural search and media buying.

In recognition of this, we introduced new services to offer our merchant partners in 2007.  Services including PPC Management, Social Media Marketing and SEO Services. We're especially excited about our Social Media Marketing service, as there are few companies out there that can do this as well and as effectively as AMWSO. When compared to CPM banner advertising, Social Media marketing can achieve volumes more "bang for the buck." This effectiveness should not only be measured in terms of raw traffic numbers, but targeted and engaged traffic.

Toward the end of the year, AMWSO announced it's affiliation with Syntryx. Syntyx is a powerful tool allowing AMWSO to delve deeper into the web to find great affiliate partners and to help our merchant partners better understand where their traffic comes from and use this as a competitive advantage. I'll be writing much more about Syntryx in a blog entry in January.

The core team at AMWSO remained unchanged throughout the year, and we're excited and motivated going into 2008. We have new ideas that we'll be working on to grow our partners businesses, and we'll be bringing on some great new partners in the coming months.  Definitely stay tuned to this blog for some great stuff in 2008!

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Commission Junction Damaging the Future of Affiliate Marketing!

If you're an affiliate marketer or read affiliate blogs, then you must have heard that Spybot Search and Destroy is now immunizing it's users against CJ links. Any Spybot user using this immunization feature will be lead to an error page after clicking a CJ link. No chance for a sale to be made for the affiliate, no affiliate cookie is ever set.

CPA-Affiliates wrote a blog article breaking this story and Shoemoney also wrote a nice follow-up. In the comments many people call on CJ to "fight against the Spybot program" or address / correct this issue with Spybot. I suggest CJ would do much better to address the root reason why these spyware protection programs block CJ/affiliate cookies.

Anyone in the industry knows that CJ permits too many shady practice affiliates to operate on their network. Much of an affiliate manager's daily activity with a program on CJ revolves around weeding out bad affiliates. Bad affiliates that are using shady practices such as browser hijacking through toolbars, cookie stuffing, forced redirects and forced clicks. Lip-service is paid to the CJ terms of service written against these practices, but true enforcement is passive and minimal at best. The short-term benefit from the added commission revenue just seems too tempting on a broad network-wide scale. However, short-term shady profit acquisition will damage the long-term health of the affiliate industry. Affiliate marketing's reputation will further slip toward the perception of shady/bad business.

Affiliate networks need to follow the Shareasale example, and clean up their act. Networks are making a few extra dollars now, but what happens when Google / Yahoo / Firefox / Spybot etc., start using this justification to block affiliate links and cookies on a much wider scale? What happens when merchants start taking a hard look at the bottom line and realize that shady affiliates are cannibalizing other sales channels and start bailing out of their programs in droves? Poor perceptions can quickly outweigh the perception of value found from hard-working, true value adding affiliates.

Clean up your act CJ, and gain further leverage with Spybot and other spyware programs to stop blocking affiliate links. Even a small step such as providing full click source data to merchants to view and audit could carry a long way toward cleaning things up.

If you have a program on CJ that is infested with bad affiliates and poor performance / ROI, consider seeking the services of an outsourced affiliate program manager before terminating your program.

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OPM Firms as a stabilizing force..

The thought of "Corporate Stability via OPM Firms" had never crossed my mind, but the other day one of the AMWSO team came to me and said: "My contact at the clients end is leaving for a new job, he introduced me to his replacement last night, 4th one in three years."

And that's when it struck me: I looked over all our corporate clients and sure enough, every one has had at least three changes in staff and management in the time we've worked with them! So that's three chances for:

• Knowledge to be lost.
• Down-time for training up new staff.
• Lost continuity with affiliates.
• Lost contacts and relationships.
  
• And more I am sure.
  

I never really saw OPMs as a "stability" factor in large firms before, but looking at their high turn over rate of staff, it becomes obvious that many firms rely on their outsourced partners (of any kind really) for stability, just as much as they do for their professional skills. An OPM firm can provide continuity in the area of expertise, like for example, AMWSO does for the affiliate channel. It’s a very solid value-add factor which I hadn’t really thought about until now.

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