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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Linkshare Awards a real blast

Well, just got back from the Linkshare Awards Dinner - Food was awesome at Cyprianis and the networking was even better - these events are far too much fun to be considered work!

2 AMWSO clients were nominated this year, Forzieri for International Merchant and Gaiam for Innovative Merchant, and unfortunately we only won one of them.So Forzieri is a bridesmaid for the second time - but I get the feeling a future Golden Link is on its way for this excellent merchant and its super AM Patrick Goodfellow.On a brighter note, Gaiam as expected won Innovative Merchant of the Year for the use of affiliate coded text links in video - very cool - and it was a thrill to go up with Bill Moran from Gaiam to accept the award on behalf of Pete and James Nardell (the AMWSO AMs for Gaiam). Nice job indeed guys!

Personally I think the Innovative Merchant Award is one of the best prizes to win - it's super to be recognized for creativity and ingenuity! Congrats to all the winners, and indeed all who were nominated - see ya all at the Symposium.

Cheers,

Will H-W

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Pre Coded Video via RSS Feeds...

It's late and it's the weekend, and I should be in bed, my eye sight is kinda blured, but the truth is there in front of me... I've managed to put a Gaiam video into the LinkShare RSS and have it spit out the other side pre-coded with the affiliate link... and I've played with the content, updated it, changed it and generally mucked around and it's still working, still updating in real time and still tracking perfectly. You can check out the sample I threw together here. It is rough and ready. Or log into LinkShare and grab the raw feed Gaiam (TEST) from the RSS section.

And I must admit when the LinkShare RSS for merchants email arrived in my mail box on April 1 I thought it was some ones idea of a really poor joke... especially when I logged in and couldn't find it.

As it turns out I've been able to plug our own custom RSS feeds for merchant news direct into the LinkShare system with no fuss at all and now I have Video. I shouldn't, but there was nothing else to do at 2 am this morning so I thought I'd have a crack at it before breakfast.

So now it's working I better work out how we can put this to the best use.

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