Affiliate Trust

twitter - Follow and Followed Alike…

I’ve found that for a given topic, affiliate marketing in this case, you can find a lot of good quality tweeps associated with the topic, and follow them expecting a ROF (Return On Follow) of new followers. I originally did this with the AffiliateTrust account and was stopped in my tracks at the wall with 2001 follows. The wall is twitter’s limit to following without an equal number of followers. The followers began accruing and after a few months of not following anyone new, sort of topped out at about 1750. Wanting to get over that 2001 wall and being so close, I decided to go for it. But how?

I’ve thought about using twitter apps that prune out follows who aren’t following back, but want a little more control over the process. Recently twitter added the new feature that places buttons for context menus on each follower and followed in your lists. I looked for a way to determine which of the followed are followers by examining the menu in the followed list. I found that ones following me had a DM option that was absent from ones not following. So I simply went down the list and un-followed most of the non-followers.

There were a couple problems that came up…

I found that the context menu covered up the next button in the list when using Firefox. To speed up removing hundreds of followed, I started at the bottom of the list rather than the top to overcome this.

The second was that removing people caused the page to backfill when advancing to the next page. This meant that I had to go back a page over and over to continue removal. To solve this I found the very last page of the followed list. How did I do it? Look at the address of the page. There will be a page number for the page you’re on. Divide your followed total by 20 and round up. Enter that as the page number to go directly to the last page. Then begin at the bottom of the last page and work your way backwards through the list.

I removed about a thousand followed yesterday which freed me to add new followers and I added about 800 in two separate session. After the first session of additions my followers suddenly dropped off to 1750. I don’t know why. All I can come up with is that I may have removed some followed that happen to have been following me. In any case, this meant I now had to gain 250 users to get over that wall instead of the original 150.

Where did I find ones to follow? I picked a tweep connected with Internet/affiliate marketing who has over 24,000 followers. I figured these would be well targeted for the topic. So I opened his follower list and went to work. This is actually easier than it sounds. I simply went down the list clicking follow follow follow… I wanted to be a little more selective though, so I skimmed the tweeps and primarily selected ones that were obviously personal accounts with portrait avatars and real names. I quickly began to notice patterns in some of the accounts and realized that a huge percentage of this persons followers were spammers. There were many relating to escort and dating services so I avoided most accounts with pretty girl avatars. No wonder he had over 24k followers!

After a few hours of work I hit last nights follower goal of 1900 at about 1:00AM, then went to bed. The followers were accruing at about two a minute. I expected to get over the wall by the time I got up.

Sure enough! This morning the count was right at 2090 and is now at 2120 and still climbing. Oh man, just realized that now that I’m over the wall, I’ve got another thousand to go after.

I’m not claiming that this technique will work for all twitter accounts. Like affiliate marketing, your twitter account will need to provide some value for your followers. And for longevity you should target tweeps that will be receptive to your message. You won’t meet these goals with the rampant “400 followers immediately” schemes. It takes work. Then, once you have a large audience, with carefully composed and balanced pitches, you can reach thousands…

And “pitches” is a topic for another day…

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

Of victory and defeat, confrontation is the victor!

It’s a very simple strategy. The observation of suspicious merchant activity is posted. The merchant is invited to the discussion and confronted with the facts. The resulting action or inaction determines whether the merchant’s affiliate program is listed in the trusted merchants list or the un-trusted merchants warning list. There is no brow beating, threats, or insults, but “just the facts ma’am“. The consequences are either good press, or bad press. And Internet press lasts forever.

A Victory…
It was discovered that Gold Star Nutrition (www.powerthin.com) exhibited extraneous reversal rates in their affiliate program statistics on Shareasale. A merchant alert * was sent. The next morning, John from Gold Star Nutrition registered with Affiliate Trust and constructive discussion ensued. John answered affiliate’s questions and explained the reason for the spike in reversals. Affiliates went away happy and John’s affiliate program earned a place on the trusted merchants list that is being developed for inclusion in the forum very soon. This is one of several recent victories resulting from Affiliate Trust merchant alerts *.

A Defeat…
While researching affiliate programs for fragrance merchants, a member noticed leaks on unlimitedperfumes.com, the website of Unlimited Perfumes Inc, a Shareasale merchant. The leaks included banners to other fragrance merchants and Google ads. A merchant alert * was sent on May 25th with no response and a second attempt was made to invite the merchant to the discussion on July 5th. A representative registered the next day and joined the discussion. He/she posted the reasoning that “Often time what we are seeing is the ads HELP us to convert at a higher rate because our pricing is the lowest on the market.“. After a little more discussion he/she assured us that “I have had my programmer remove all analytics and affiliate code, pending further discussion as a company. There should be no more “leaks.”“. This sounded good, but it was soon discovered that a price comparison banner leads to perfumecompare.com, another website owned by Unlimited Perfumes Inc. The plot thickens! On perfumecompare.com there were links to other perfume sites. Some of these other sites are also owned by Unlimited Perfumes Inc. Here’s the kicker… Other sites linked to from perfumecompare.com are fragrance sites that Unlimited Perfumes Inc. is an affiliate of! Oh what a tangled web we weave when… well you know! Not only is affiliate traffic potentially leaked to AdSense ads, but the traffic that Unlimited Perfume’s own affiliates deliver is redirected to earn Unlimited Perfumes commissions AS an affiliate. When these facts were presented to the rep, he/she disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since.

Unlimited Perfumes owns…
unlimitedperfume.com
unlimitedperfumes.com
perfume-room.com
perfumeroom.com
perfumecompare.com

They are affiliates of at least these…
FragranceNet
Perfume Worldwide
FragranceX
Scented Monkey

While I labeled the Unlimited Perfumes effort a defeat, is it really? The knowledge of merchants to avoid is as valuable as the knowledge of trusted merchants to join. That the confrontation happens is what matters!

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

*Merchant Alerts is an exclusive feature of Affiliate Trust. Members may send official alerts to merchants through email under the umbrella of Affiliate Trust. The identity of the sender is not exposed and the emails are sent through the AT email system. These alerts notify the merchant of active discussion about their affiliate program and the type of concern raised by affiliates. They are invited to join the discussion and address the concerns of affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing: How Nichie Can You Get?

Niche is a word that most affiliates struggle with. They ask how, what, will??? If you’re lucky enough to hit on a niche that’s popular but not saturated, you can make money… but only for a while. Profitable niches are fleeting. Other marketers inevitably find out and your competition only grows, never shrinks.

Consider a niche within a niche. We run an eCommerce site that targets a particular audience. The variety of products that appeal to that audience is virtually endless. But call that target audience our top level niche. Now within the top level we offer a variety of product categories. Each is the next level niche. There may be several categories within categories. All of these are niches that become more narrowly defined as you drill down to individual products. Individual products can be even nichier if you want to consider colors and sizes. For instance, large size product niches can be lucrative.

What led me to this discourse? One of our product categories contains a selection of about twenty items with various features, prices, and brands. There are several brands that we carry just one product each of. We sold one of these single items this morning. I was curious as to why this one instead of another brand with a number of different choices. So I checked the traffic stats and found that there was a Google search for this particular brand that resulted in the sale. I’ve found that this is a pretty common occurrence. We sell more products through targeted searches than through more general searches where the shopper browses the site. Though the stats show that this shopper spent ten minutes on the site and viewed seven pages, she still settled on the product she originally searched for.

Though we continually promote our brand and hope that shoppers are attracted to our home page, this simply is not where the traffic arrives. It virtually always arrives at the very nichiest of pages, the individual product pages. So though you build a great website from the top down like we did, your traffic will usually arrive at the bottom.

This concept becomes critical to PPC (pay per click) advertising. I can imagine a graph in my mind. One line represents nichieness (an imaginary quantity) and the other represents CTR (click through rate). CTR will unquestionably follow nichieness proportionately. Add another quantity, [PPC] cost. Cost will graph inversely proportionate to nichieness and CTR. So theoretically, the nichier your campaign, the lower your advertising cost.

There’s a lot of talk about the magic bullet. Most experienced affiliate marketers insist that there is no magic bullet. I contend that there IS a magic bullet, but you have to mold it yourself. It can’t be purchased at the magic bullet store.

So how do you mold the magic bullet? Don’t labor so much over your top level niche choice. Build a top down website that gives you the flexibility to experiment within an established base. Build it to facilitate easy product additions and updating. Add appropriate products with unique detail pages and images. Optimize for searches at the nichiest levels (products) rather than the categories, or your website brand. Never remove non-performing products, but continually add products. When you hit on a success, leverage that success before it disappears by giving that product more attention than non-performing products. Fine-tune SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC campaigns. Let demand drive your promotion rather than promoting to create demand.

And… get nichie!

For insights and discussion about this and many other topics, visit the Affiliate Trust Forum.

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

Affiliate Marketing - Leaky Merchants

In thinking about a couple merchants that were reported as having “leaks” on the Affiliate Trust Forum, I feel it necessary to find some value consideration in the method from the merchant’s perspective. Two very large merchants, Amazon and Overstock.com, were reported as having leaks. eBay has leaks as well. These are very large profitable corporations that can’t be passed off as being clueless to some negative impact from inclusion of external links (leaks) on their ecommerce sites. In fact, you can safely assume that these links are beneficial to the bottom line in one way or other since ROI drives corporate marketing methods. <SPECULATION>The links included on these big brand sites must belong to sister companies, companies having some vested interest, or companies with mutually beneficial agreements in place.</SPECULATION> There are undoubtedly other motivations for external links.

But as a merchant myself, with no sister companies or special agreements, external links make no sense whatsoever. Once we’ve attracted a shopper to visit the site, the only external link I want them to take is the one that authorizes their credit card.

So where does the smaller merchant fit into this grand scheme? At the Amazon end, the small independent merchant end such as mine, or somewhere in between? Is that “somewhere in between” simply the result of observing the methods of the big guns and following suit without an understanding of the ramification, lost sales?

For the marketing affiliate, leaks are another black hole that sucks potential commissions when they’ve delivered the customer. Affiliate Trust provides a mechanism for observation and reporting of leaky merchants. Merchant alert emails are sent as a result of these reports and a merchant representative invited to join the discussion and address the concerns of their affiliates. As we interact with leaky merchants many of these questions will be answered and published.

AffiliateTrust.org

Now The twitter Rush …

There was the gold rush, then the Internet rush, and now the twitter rush. I’m reminded of the early days of the Internet. Remember when domain names were free to register as many as you wanted? And to publish anything that remotely resembled commercialism was looked on with disdain? Had the pundits won out we would still be reading science journals and thesi in static form with gray backgrounds. So goes a market driven society where demand shapes services and drives development. Participating in an active marketing forum tends to keep one on the cutting edge of the latest fads and raves as they ebb and flow. So this twitter thing began coming up in conversation. Statements that such and such twittered this or tweeted that [or chirped... oh, pardon me] were heard, but any sort of standard terminology seemed to escape many. So what is this new service that turns an adult business professional into a twit… uh… tweeter? It’s twitter, the so called micro-blogging platform, where you say in 140 characters or less, what you’re up to… as if most people would care. It’s the latest pet rock phenomenon. No, it’s a pet rock that talks back… sometimes. More often though, tweeps [twitter peeps?] talk to themselves. And even more intriguing is that hundreds, if not thousands of other tweeps follow them around listening to them talk to themselves. Well, I sound knowledgeable enough that it almost sounds like I’ve taken the twitter plunge… on my own defense, I resisted, clawing the floor, kicking and screaming. Some of the AT members insisted that resistance was futile. And thus I was dragged in. I had been successful for so long in avoiding that time pit called twitter, but now find that the gravity is too great for any firm stance. I’m not convinced that such a service will produce any sort of profound social benefit for it’s users, but I do recognize a market represented by this growing society of tweeps that’s skyrocketing into huge numbers. The jury is still out in how twitter will monetize their service, but they’ve let it be known that there are no restrictions on user’s commercialization of it. This leads to the next question, how can we leverage the service for the benefit of our businesses? About the Internet rush and those free domain names that have faded from our memories, same goes for twitter usernames. twitter has rules in place to prevent them from becoming a commodity. But, if you want names that relate to you and your business, better move quickly… even if you currently have no interest in twitter. There are continuing discussions in the Affiliate Trust forum about using twitter to market and profit. Join us for this next great rush… Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

Affiliate Marketing TOS - Anarchic or Tyrannic?

My favorite method of analysis is to look at the extremes of opposite positions. That doesn’t label me as an extremest as the hypothesis always lands somewhere in the middle. Let’s apply that method to a question that was posted in the AT forum a few days ago; “How could the merchant demonstrate that the affiliates were ethical?” Now, the extremes; Either run an anarchic program with no rules, which eliminates the question of merchant/affiliate ethics altogether, assuming that the rules define ethics in this case, or disallow all methods that breed unethical behavior such as PPC, software, and incentives. Neither may be a good choice from the merchant’s point of view. The problems with anarchy seem obvious, and there are also problems with the opposite tyrannical approach. As we’ve been seeing, merchants are clamoring for so called “super affiliates” who leverage the methods of the “force”. As we know the force has a good side and a dark side. So by disallowing all use of the force, merchants who are so desperate for sales in the current economic environment may be throwing the baby out with the bath water. How can merchants employ the force while preventing methods of the dark side?

First the merchant must put a lot of thought and effort into composing their TOS (terms of service) agreement, making certain that all bases are covered. Those bases include (but are not limited to) tracking, compensation, marketing methods, infractions, and consequences. Then, when affiliate compliance issues arise they can always refer to agreed upon terms and act accordingly. The TOS is the merchant’s constitution and should be revered as such and never wavered from.
The biggest challenge will not be enforcement. With a comprehensive TOS agreement, enforcement is a piece of cake. The biggest challenge is policing the program. Effective discovery and investigation are difficult at best and require resources and continual monitoring.
So, the more rules you implement, the more difficult policing will be and the more resources will be required. The fewer rules, the less effective and profitable the affiliate marketing program will be. Resources required for more rules eat profits, but on the other hand, affiliates using unscrupulous methods in anarchic programs steal profit. Is there an acceptable measure of loss as with credit card providers that accept a given amount of theft as a business expense? Where is the middle ground? How can we expect merchants who are in the business to sell products and services, to operate an effective affiliate marketing program at all?
Use the force, but find that balance where the rules outlaw abuse while policing is manageable.

Ed Byerly
AffiliateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org
Blog.AffiliateTrust.org

Toolbar Wars - You don’t know the power of the dark side!

I sense something… a presence I’ve not felt since… a very long discussion about the One Cause CPO (commission poaching object) at ABW. The force is strong with this one. What is this power, this force, this magnetism? What feeds and energizes it? Could it be a frantic clamor to offset the ravages of a harsh economy? The plight of the street walkers? The destiny of the unprepared? This is YOUR destiny? You’re drawn, and don the cloth of the dark side, to cloak your true intentions, your hood pulled close around your face, your glare staring from the darkness within, stalking your next victim, ready to pounce. Spotted! The deliverer, the seller, the naive, hoping, working for nigh. You spring to snatch the prey from their grasp. The truth? The vast majority of affiliate toolbars, residing on Internet shopper’s computers, sit and watch for the shopper to happen by an affiliated merchant’s website, and either entices the shopper to click it’s own affiliate link, or sets it’s affiliate tracking cookie transparently. The result is a commission snatched from the grasp of the ones who did the work of delivering the buyer, by one who simply waits to spring.

One of the last vestiges of the good side of the force, Share A Sale Inc., is preparing to More »

Merchant’s Perspective - AdSense or NonSense?

This just in…
Tool King Sprouting Leaks!

Tool King, an e-tailer marketing tools of all kinds utilizes the affiliate marketing channel to enhance their own sales efforts. AdSense ads began appearing on the ToolKing.com website enticing Tool King shoppers to More »