What do you do on Black Friday?
 Of course, you’re probably aware that the day after Thanksgiving has earned the nickname Black Friday. Black Friday has become the traditional day that retail sales soar and the number at the bottom of the profit/loss statement turns from red ink for 11/12 of the year to black ink. As an Internet marketer, what do you do on Black Friday? When we moved to the Pacific Northwest in ‘85 it was a wondrous world with lots of opportunity and possibilities. Not that Modesto was podunk town, but the one mall was rather limiting, AND boring. So we had nearly three quarters of a year to find our way around town and settled in on a favorite mall before Thanksgiving arrived. For me, the strongest attraction to this mall was Captain Beans, one of the few places where you could buy a good cappuccino. The only problem was, it was about twenty miles down the freeway. Those were my corporate days, but being a resident employee, my boss was 650 miles to the south in Hayward and I was free to roam during the business day. Oh wait, my job actually required me to roam. But it wasn’t unusual to make two trips a day to Captain Beans, even on those days when I worked in my office… but I digress. That thanksgiving in ‘85 was so different from today’s Thanksgivings. Our families were all down in California. We had two kids then and it was a family day just for us. But what did we do on Friday? We hit that favorite mall. Little did we know that it seemed as though everyone in the Pacific Northwest had the same idea. We didn’t go to shop necessarily, but just to enjoy the atmosphere. We ordered our favorite Captain Beans drinks and strolled. The only unpleasant thing about that day was the very frustrating experience of trying to get out of the parking lot when the day ended. A road circumvented the perimeter and was bumper to bumper the whole way around. It took an hour just to get out. Now, twenty four years later, we’re still trekking to Clackamas Town Center the day after Thanksgiving. Things are different now. The parking has been improved with multilevel garages. Captain Beans is now called something else that I don’t remember because Starbucks is too convenient to take a twenty mile trip for a cappuccino. And we now number thirteen instead of the original four. No, not thirteen children, but thirteen sons, daughter, son in-laws, daughter in-laws, and granddaughters. And yes, we all go! So as an Internet Marketer, I spend Black Friday as a family man…
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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…
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.
Earbuds and Potato Chips…
I originally posted this in a members only section of the Affiliate Trust Forum and the members seemed to like it so I decided to publish it as a follow up to the last blog article about cellphones. I promise I’ll get back to business with some new affiliate marketing posts soon.
I’m new to the earbud thing. To me a good quality headset is one that fits over the entire ear and has nice soft cushions to seal in the sound. Had I been using this kind I might have attracted hecklers, but I wouldn’t have had the trouble I experienced.
I paid for higher quality KOSS earbuds as I wanted to gain every advantage in listening to the tinny minuscule audio produced by my new phone. My wife is out of town helping her dad, so with the fully charged phone, the new earbuds and the necessary adapters in the stylish little spring closure pouch in hand, I trekked to the nearest Panera Bread to enjoy some soup and a sandwich while listening to a podcast of an old radio drama, “The Shadow”. The restaurant wasn’t busy so my food arrived promptly. I sat down in a two person booth, and after preparing my sandwich with all the condiments I could muster, I set my phone on the table and pulled out my new earbuds. I spent the next five minutes untangling the wires. Now, in order for earbuds to produce any bass at all, they must be tightly seated into the ear to produce a good seal. So I inserted and twisted until I was satisfied that they were secure. The first thing I noticed about these earbuds was that when they’re properly inserted, don’t plan on being able to hear ANYTHING from the outside.
So I scooted forward in the seat and leaned back in a relaxed posture, picked up the phone and loaded the podcast. This particular one was fairly low in volume and sounded like it was recorded from the actual broadcast on an old fashioned AM radio. There was quite a bit of bleedover from adjacent stations, which really added to the nostalgia. Turning the volume all the way up made it comfortably loud. Ah, this is going to be good. So I listened for a couple minutes and then took a bite of my sandwich. Whoa! Chewing is really loud in here (in my head) when outside sounds are totally blocked! Well, that’s ok, I can still hear. Then I pulled out one of those potato chips, which are extra crispy at Panera. Man alive! There may as well have been a jack hammer running in the next booth! I could hear nothing but crunching potato chips. I tried chewing very slowly, but it didn’t help. So back to the sandwich.
My next bite revealed a whole new problem. When chewing there’s no way to keep those earbuds in your ears. The chewing action of the jaws quickly works the earbuds right out of position. First the left one lost it’s seat, then the right one, then back to the left one. I was constantly cramming the things back in my ears. So my relaxing meal with The Shadow ended up not being so relaxing after all. Guess I’ll have to stick to Starbucks if I want to get away from the office with The Shadow… unless drinking coffee sounds like getting a swirly!
AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org
Business Cellular on a Budget
I usually blog about affiliate marketing, but every once in a while something related to business comes up that’s worth passing on. This is not a promo for any particular product or service and there is no compensation involved. This was intended to be a post at the Affiliate Trust Forum but was becoming a book, so here it lands…
Whenever I get mail from Qwest that doesn’t look like the regular bill, I just toss it because it’s usually a special offer or promo. I got another one a few days ago that I’m glad I opened. Had it not been in a large manila envelope, it would have suffered the demise of the others.
Turns out that Qwest is closing Qwest Wireless services and apparently becoming an agent of Verizon. I currently subscribe to Qwest business services that ties my cell service with my business landline service through what they call “one number”. So how will this impact the communications I’ve relied on for so many years? It’s not pretty! No more one number service that automatically routes calls for either the landline or cell number to the cell phone when it’s on, or either number to the landline when the cell phone is off. When unanswered our office voicemail system picks up the call. Not only this, but it’s goodbye trusty Motorola V710. This cell phone will become obsolete and worthless when the change is complete in September. I’ll salvage the micro SD card, but that’s it.
Next thought… hmm, perhaps now is my chance to catch up with technology (again!). My wife and I… well, let’s just say we’re behind the times. My youngest son, his girlfriend, and my daughter all have G-Phones. My older son has an I-Phone. Every time I’m with them something comes up that sends them scurrying to search Google using their phones. I sort of pat my Moto and watch longingly while they access the world at their fingertips.
So I began a qwest (sic) to see what I can do to catch up. And sorry, I just don’t use the phone enough to make the purchase price of an I or G phone worthwhile, along with their exorbitant monthly connection fees.
Enter the Samsung Omnia… it seems you hear so much about the I and G phones with their touch screens that you may not realize there are alternatives with similar features. Verizon offers a selection of touch screen phones. I spotted the Omnia and did a little research. There’s a good review with video at cnet reviews. This is a “smart phone” running MS Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional with Microsoft® office Word Mobile, Excel® Mobile, and PowerPoint® Mobile; Adobe® Reader® LE PDF viewer, and Opera™ Mobile browser. It’s Wi–Fi Capable, plays DivX movies, and includes 8GB of additional internal memory. Wow! And the good news, with the Qwest 25% discount and the rebate that comes with the phone, it’s costing me about $75.
So for you fulltime Internet marketers who desire mobile business and communications access, the Omnia may just fit the bill.
AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org
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
A Parade of Wanna-be Affiliate Marketing Associations
Affiliate Trust, Affiliate Voice, and the Performance Marketing Alliance
This is going to be a quite cynical treatise addressing the feasibility of an affiliate marketing industry organization. It will probably make some people angry, including Affiliate Trust members. They may ask, “what motivated you to post such a rant?”. Observation, experience, and realization have led to the conclusions expressed here.
In my year at the ABW (A Best Web) forum I contributed a great deal of time and comment toward becoming a member of the community. I was asked by Haiko, the forum administrator, to serve as a moderator, which I gladly agreed to. That was quite a revealing, and sometimes entertaining vantage point for observing the inner works of affiliate marketing.
In November, the One Cause/LinkShare debacle surfaced. Many ABW members ranted and raved about the inequities of the merchant/network/affiliate relationship and the unfairness of some marketing methods. Ideas were thrown around, frustration was expressed, anger led to insult, people were banned, and the sources of the controversy became silent… a typical ABW experience. It seemed like an ideal time to gather all this disdain into a viable force to attack some of the inequities that affiliates find themselves on the short end of. So I approached Haiko about firing up the Affiliate Voice organization that he had birthed. By then there was an AV logo and a false store front but no substance. He refused my suggestion and my offer to help.
Since all Haiko wanted to do was rant, and still feeling like something could be done to support and strengthen the affiliate dimension of affiliate marketing, I started fielding some ideas on the forum. There were a lot of members who agreed and would be willing to support the cause. So Affiliate Trust was born.
The premise was to base our entire organization on communication and education. It would be geared toward influencing merchants having affiliate marketing programs. We began working on compiling a database of contact information for distributing multimedia presentations about profitable and unprofitable marketing methods. The parasite methods of ones like One Cause would be exposed as commission sucking techniques to avoid. We had several different projects in progress simultaneously that included video examples of detrimental marketing methods.
We needed contributing members to accomplish the AT goals. The contributions were not monetary, but time and expertise. So the membership drive began. Posts at ABW asking for help in achieving the AT goals were met with positive comments and a few volunteers were garnished. Haiko was supportive as expressed in private communications with me.
Here’s the kicker… the very outspoken ones who seemed so supportive during the One Cause explosion in November were more or less absent from the roster of volunteers when the time came to put action to their words. What’s more, some who went so far as to join AT went no further than posting once that “I’m here to help”, and then disappearing.
To add insult to injury, when trying to recruit those same people who openly expressed their disdain for the One Cause scheme, I was apparently perceived as a threat to the sovereignty of ABW, and viciously tarred and feathered and dragged through ABestWeb like a rapist and run out of town on a rail. This speaks of a double standard practiced by the ABW administration and some members. I still haven’t gathered the courage and donned enough armor to take a look at the text of that tar and feathering. I’m advised that I should delete it and never look.
So here’s the conclusion I’ve come to. Affiliate marketing is made up of individual, independent, small business people who have loosely bound contracts with merchants to provide Internet advertising services. They, for the most part, have no relation with peer affiliates and operate independently to maximize their profits and advance their own businesses. They make business decisions based on profit and return on investment. They don’t seem to be interested in the time and effort required in banning together with other affiliates in attempts to accomplish a goal, that based on this assumption, is extracurricular. Deep down, they probably know that no self composed affiliate bill of rights, best practices, seal of approval, or any other device, can be imposed on the industry in general, or particularly on other facets of an industry where the merchants [and networks] they affiliate with are as independent as they. I highly doubt that free coffee mugs or t-shirt slogan contests will be any motivation in persuading potential members to fork over their hard earned money or time.
So I begin to wonder if other organizations are seeing more success in attracting members than Affiliate Trust. If so, I would think the numbers would be touted and displayed for all to see. What are the Performance Marketing Alliance numbers? What are the Affiliate Voice Numbers. What are the Affiliate Trust numbers? If Affiliate Trust had thousands, you can bet they’d be prominently displayed on our site. I even removed the Affiliate Trust member count from public view. It represented a dismal expression of the true desire of affiliate marketers to contribute in any appreciable way to the health and welfare of the industry.
So as the parade turns the corner and only the fading beat of the throbbing bass drum remains, affiliate marketers will turn back to their monitors and return in step to the beat of their own drum.
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.
Now The twitter Rush …
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Just the facts ma’am…
Observation - Analysis - Testing - Reporting
| In the midst of an ailing economy, the Internet marketing industry is abuzz with activity. Much of that activity revolves around tuning affiliate programs and trying new methods to glean every possible sale from that vast cloud of potential Internet shoppers. Many merchants and affiliates alike are beginning to exploit affiliate marketing methods that have existed for years, but have been continually railed against by some in the affiliate community. With a recent proliferation of new toolbars that pop, drop, flash, beep, and change color to entice shoppers to pick a coupon, get a deal, receive cash back, donate to their school, or any number of other reasons to click, affiliates involved in conventional search engine marketing are feeling the squeeze. Many are expressing their distaste of such methods in belligerent dialog through their favorite forum venue. This distaste manifests itself in the form of insult, name calling, and threats toward a many times hapless affiliate manager who turns out to be clueless of the negative impact certain affiliate marketing methods may have on his program. And there are times that the vigilantes, after beating up on an affiliate manager and her program, will learn that steps WERE taken to protect the marketing efforts of the merchant’s other partners, which results in egg on their faces. I suppose intimidation is one way to skin the cat, but there must be a more effective way than this seat of the pants approach of discovery, accusation, intimidation, and hope. |
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Affiliate Trust is taking a more systematic approach than your typical intimidation vigilante forum… Observation When suspicious activity is reported or observed, rather than calling in the dogs for a free for all, Affiliate Trust is nearing completion of a merchant alert mechanism that will notify merchants of potentially detrimental methods reported by their marketing partners. They will be invited to join the discussion. Analysis Information learned from the merchant will serve as input to analyze their technique and determine it’s process. Testing AT will then test the method to ascertain the validity of the analysis. Reporting The recording and documenting of tests will serve as input for accurate reporting of findings. Reports will be published and posted. A favorable outcome would be that the merchant would decide to forgo using the methods of concern. In that case, the merchant will be added to the AT Trusted Merchant List. Otherwise it will be added to a list disclosing the detrimental methods in use. Simple as that. Affiliates may just happen to refer to that list and decide not to join with merchants utilizing certain marketing methods. So if you prefer the emotionally charged approach, AT is probably not for you. If you’d like to take a more objective, Joe Friday “just the facts ma’am” systematic approach, visit AffiliateTrust.org, have a look, and join right in… |