It’s a good question isn’t it?  Do you care about what kind of offers you promote?  Or do you just care if they make money or not?

One of the problems with affiliate marketing is that it can become a little bit anonymous at time. I can see where many people just think of clicks as “clicks” and conversions as “conversions”.

In reality clicks are people.  And conversions are people filling out a form or buying a product.

Easy to forget.  Important to remember.

Here are some good questions to ask yourself before you start promoting an offer:

• Are these people getting something good in exchange for their money or data?
• Do I even know? Have I tested the offer myself?
• Would I recommend this offer to a member of my family or a friend?
• Would I feel comfortable putting my name and picture on the landing page saying “I highly recommend this product!”

If the answer is yes to all four questions you likely have a very good product that could make you a good deal of money long-term.  It also comes with a great side benefit: Feeling good about what you promote.

All the best.

-Ola

Hi,

Hope you’re having a great summer!  (or winter if you happen to be in the southern part of the globe).

I will be expanding more on the term “Long Term Affiliate Marketing” in an upcoming report but in a nutshell: Build a repeat audience for the long-term and sell multiple products and services to it.

I know….  It’ s such an easy and simple suggestion.

But it is also one of the most powerful and single most important strategic decisions an affiliate marketer can make.  In todays fast-paced affiliate world offers come and go.  And if you’re building your business on short-term campaigns you’re in for an uphill battle.

How many times have you got an email from your account manager saying that Campaign XYZ, one where you have been making serious money with, has been paused or discontinued?   Pretty irritating, isn’t it?

To simplify:  There are two types of affiliates.  One is focused on offers…  the other is focused on building a long-term stable audience.

1. One is sending one-time traffic to advertisers and make (or lose) money.

2. The other one is creating a loyal audience in a specific kind of vertical and even better: Establishes a toll booth where advertisers pay to get access to this audience.  Not only high commissions.   But slotting fees.

Which one would you rather be?

Talk to you soon.

-Ola

It’s a great first issue and can’t wait to see what’s next.  If you live in the US you can subscribe for free to the print edition here.    The digital version is available for download here.

Enjoy!

-Ola

Here is an excerpt:

How do you feel affiliate marketing budgets might be affected if and when retailers move away from the ‘last click wins’ model?

Bottom line: This is where the action is — and things are just now beginning to heat up. Watch for companies like ValueClick taking all their performance-based media opportunities and roll them together for larger advertisers — using CPA affiliate networks like Commission Junction as an “indicator of purchase intent” in a more complex, yet highly predictable, shopper behaviour pattern.

Who wins on the publisher side? Those who provide the most value and the value game always comes down to actions.

Highly recommended.  Here is the link again.

-Ola

Big news this morning.. Microsoft is launching an incentive portal and are opening up a CPA network.

In an attempt to generate more market share in the search space Microsoft has just launched a new cash back portal. You search for products and services featured on their cash back portal and get a certain percentage of each purchase back in cash. When your cash back balance has reached $5.00 you can redeem it.

As an example a Canon Powershot A470 digital camera is featured on the home page with most stores offering 2-5% cash back to consumers. Featured merchants include Home Depot, Barnes and Nobles, Circuit City, Sears, Overstock, New Egg, Office Max and others.

They also launched their brand new CPA network. Advertisers can advertise their products with a cash back offer and only pay for generated customers.

The cpa network is currently available to businesses that are:

• Headquartered in the United States
• A retail site with e-commerce capabilities
• Able to fulfill the physical shipment of a product
• Able to create and maintain a product data feed
• Able to implement a standard tracking pixel on your website’s order confirmation page

There is no open self-service sign up so to get started you have to fill in a form or talk to your existing Microsoft account executive.

Will this work? Microsoft is definitely going to get a fair amount of market share from discount buyers and consumers already interested in cash back offers. Is it the silver bullet they are looking for? Not likely.

It’s an impressive launch for sure and will be intriguing to test and follow for anyone remotely interested in affiliate programs and incentive-based shopping.

What do you think? Will it be a hit with consumers?

-Ola

You probably did not miss the news that Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo this spring. It didn’t work out because Yahoo didn’t feel like getting bought.

But the most interesting piece of information coming out of the negotiations was this: Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Publisher Network are two divisions that are now hanging very loose internally within Yahoo. Why? Yahoo decided to test outsourcing the search monetization to Google giving them approximately 3% of their inventory.

The test was hugely successful according to leaked reports in the press.

This means that Yahoo would make MORE money by outsourcing all of their search monetization to Google and scale back internal staff even after giving Google 10-15% of the gross.

Why is this? In order of importance:

1. Google has more advertisers.
2. Google has better targeting technology.
3. Google has a better system in place to get minimum bids out of their advertisers.

It’s not unlikely that YSM, YPN or both won’t be around much longer… an ad deal between Yahoo and Google could come any week now.

Hats off to Google of course for doing a great job making money.

But isn’t it sad that Google Adwords could be pretty much the only game in town for search marketing this fall?

-Ola

You know that there is money being made with affiliate programs. But you don’t know where to start. And you have a simple question: What kind of programs are people making money with?

I totally know the feeling. Back when I was starting out with affiliate marketing 10 years ago there were maybe 60-80 programs total.

Almost all of them were retail and sales oriented paying some ridiculously low commission for the honor of promoting some big name brand on your site.

Today there are thousands. It’s become the exception to find a good product or service that you like and would like to promote, but the company doesn’t offer an affiliate-type program.

So in a society where many people have problems deciding between a hot dog and a hamburger it’s easy to become paralyzed with all the affiliate program choices available.

So what programs to promote? Everybody will tell you the same thing. And I have to do it as well. You need to find out for yourself. You need to test. And test again.

A lot of times there are really good programs out there that top affiliates would never dream of telling anyone about. They don’t like competition.

But let me help you out a little bit.

So what are people making money with in affiliate marketing in 2008?
It’s not too hard to find out. All you need to do is to talk to 3-4 affiliate networks and find out where they’re really making the dough. What you’ll find is that everybody has pretty much the same offers.

Let’s have a look:

Social Network Accessories and Tools

The market for nice little tools, widgets and gizmos to pimp out your MySpace or Facebook page looks like it is continuing to do really well. And when Interactive Corp (the huge company that owns Ticketmaster, Expedia and others) decided to get in on the action with high paying offers for downloadable tools, there is plenty of money to go around.

Dating

I don’t think I have to explain why this is hot. It always will be, especially if you have an audience with credit cards that likes to pay for dating services, you can make a lot of money.

Mobile Offers

If the only thing a user has to do to sign up for ring tones or other mobile offers that pay affiliates $6-$16 per sign-up is to put in their cell phone number and enter a PIN code sent to their cell, we have a thriving affiliate market.

Tougher regulation by the mobile phone carriers is coming up as we speak so expect to see conversion rates continue to drop.

Financial Services

Mortgages used to be really hot. When interest rates go up and nobody qualifies anymore it’s not as hot as it used to be. But there is still a lot of money in helping people get into more debt, then helping them get out of that debt, plus insuring their car, house and life.

Long tail retail based programs

When someone is searching for a specific item in a retailers catalog she is ready to buy! And if you can grab that prospect from a search engine, you’re bound to make a sale. The one with the most keywords and best landing pages win in this game. This is where you can find a lot of golden nugget programs that most people don’t know about.

At the end of the day… it’s the old story. Testing is crucial. Marketing by numbers and data is how you really make money.

More on this in the future!

Good Luck!