Steve Monas

Affiliate Marketing

nospam@example.com (Steve Monas) — Wed, 3 Jan 2007 00:01:50 -0500

Affiliate managers are those people in a position of managing an affiliate program, and assisting the affiliates of their program in generating more sales. Affiliate managers are sometimes the business owner who created the affiliate program in the first place, but are also sometimes people who have been hired by a business owner to either create an affiliate program and/or manage an existing affiliate program.

An affiliate manager's duties may vary considerably depending on the dedication and success of that affiliate manager. To become an affiliate manager does not require any particular credentials or prior training, even though such training would be an asset. Many affiliate manager's do not do too much to manage their affiliate programs aside from keeping track of sales made by affiliates, as well as writing and sending affiliates their commission checks at the end of each pay period. This is often the low end of affiliate management that is done by business owners that are focussing their main efforts on other aspects of their business, but have created an affiliate program to stay up to date with the latest marketing trends on the internet.

Affiliate managers that have been hired to focus on maximizing an affiliate programs earning potential usually have many more duties, skills, and credentials.

These duties may include:

Creating or building the affiliate program from the bottom up, or improving it.
Keeping in close contact with their top affiliates both through e-mail and over the phone.
Training affiliates in both offline and internet marketing.
Providing up to date promotional materials for the affiliate programs products or services.
Keeping their affiliates up to date with new product/service upgrades, enhancements, or launches.
Motivating affiliates to promote and sell more products/services.
Recruiting more affiliates into the program.
Keeping track of sales made by affiliates, as well as writing and sending affiliates their commission checks.

Outsourced Program Management

Quality affiliate managers are in short supply for merchants who prefer in-house management. The most seasoned affiliate managers operate as Outsourced Program Managers (OPMs), providing affiliate program management and consulting on behalf of merchants. OPMs traditionally manage multiple affiliate programs, with some maintaining a support staff of affiliate managers which are dedicated to each merchant client.

OPMs often provide greater value and lower costs to merchants than in-house employees. OPMs typically bring a loaded rolodex of existing affiliate partnerships to their merchant clients, and can extend the merchants offer to their personal network if the program is salable. Additionally, merchants find cost benefits in OPM firms, as OPMs operate as independent contractors who do not incur health/401k benefit expenses, office space/computer costs, or training expenses.

OPM fees typically range between $2,000 and $10,000 a month in flat rates, most of which typically operate on a monthly rate and performance compensation hybrid model. Many OPMs also offer consulting services for merchants, including single-run affiliate recruitment, affiliate program optimization, program launch services, and affiliate tools/technology development.

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying a finder's fee for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per sale), or any combination.

Merchants like affiliate marketing because it is a "pay for performance model", meaning the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are realized.

Some e-commerce sites run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique, especially small and midsize businesses.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel have different technological solutions available to them. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

Revenue generated online grew quickly. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the web, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. Many companies hired outside affiliate management companies to manage the affiliate program (see outsourced program management.)

According to one report, total sales generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the UK alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005. MarketingSherpa's research team roughly estimates affiliates worldwide will earn $6.5 billion in bounty and commissions in 2006. This includes retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, 'Net marketing' education offers, subscription sites, and other lead generation, but it does not include contextual ad networks such as Google AdSense.

Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling and retail sectors. The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth in affiliate marketing are the mobile phone, finance and travel sectors. A lot of different offers from various Advertisers are available to pick from. Hot on the heels of these are the entertainment (particularly gaming) and internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from B2B marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix. Of course, this is constantly subject to change.

The following compensation models are relevant for affiliate marketing.

Pay-per-impression (PPI) / Cost-per-thousand (CPM)

Cost-per-mil (mil/mille/M = latin/Roman numeral for thousand) impressions. Publisher gets from Advertiser $x.xx amount of money for every 1000 impressions (page views/displays) of the Ad. The Ad can be text (AdSense), banner image or rich media.

Pay-per-click (PPC) / Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click. Advertiser pays publisher $x.xx amount of money, every time a visitor (potential prospect) clicks on the advertiser's Ad. It is irrelevant (for the compensation) how often an Ad is displayed. commission is only due when the Ad is clicked. See also click fraud.

Pay-per-lead (PPL) / Cost-per-action/acquisition (CPA) / Cost-per-lead CPL)

Cost-per-action or Cost-per-acquisition (CPA), Cost-per-Lead (CPL). Advertiser pays publisher $x.xx in commission for every visitor that was referred by the publisher to the advertiser (web site) and performs a desired action, such as filling out a form, creating an account or signing up for a newsletter. This compensation model is very popular with online services from internet service providers, cell phone providers, banks (loans, mortgages, credit cards) and subscription services.

Pay-per-sale (PPS) / Cost-per-sale (CPS)

Cost-per-sale (CPS). Advertiser pays the publisher a percentage (%) of the order amount (sale) that was created by a customer who was referred by the publisher. This model is by far the most common compensation model used by online retailers that have an affiliate program. This form of compensation is also referred to as Revenue sharing.

Pay-per-call (no abbreviation exists yet)

This is a new compensation model. No official abbreviation exist yet. Advertiser pays publisher a $x.xx commission for phone calls received from potential prospects as response to a specific publisher Ad. Recently developed call-tracking technology allows to create a bridge between online and offline advertising. Pay-per-call advertising is still new and in its infancy.

SEO

nospam@example.com (Steve Monas) — Tue, 2 Jan 2007 23:35:36 -0500

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) as a subset of search engine marketing seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. The quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing first to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and secondly to human visitors.

Search engine optimization is available as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because SEO often requires making changes to the source code of a site, it is often most effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, Content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

A range of strategies and techniques are employed in SEO, including changes to a site's code (referred to as "on page factors") and getting links from other sites (referred to as "off page factors"). These techniques include two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.

Pay Per Click

nospam@example.com (Steve Monas) — Tue, 2 Jan 2007 22:43:38 -0500

Pay Per Click

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines.

Advertisers bid on "keywords" that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword "red widgets", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. In the spring of 2006, MSN started beta testing their own PPC service, MSN adCenter. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Abuse of the pay per click model can result in click fraud.

PPC engines can be categorized in "Keyword", "Product", "Service" engines. However, a number of companies may fall in two or more categories. More models are continually evolving. Currently, pay per click programs do not generate any revenue solely from traffic for sites that display the ads. Revenue is generated only when a user clicks on the ad itself.

Keyword PPCs

Advertisers using these bid on "keywords", which can be words or phrases, and can include product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appears in order of the amount bid. Keywords, also referred to as search terms, are the very heart of pay per click advertising. The terms are guarded as highly valued trade secrets by the advertisers, and many firms offer software or services to help advertisers develop keyword strategies.

As of 2005, notable PPC Keyword search engines include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture Services), Microsoft adCenter, LookSmart, Miva (formerly FindWhat), Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves), 7Search, Kanoodle, and Baidu.

Product PPCs

"Product" engines let advertisers provide "feeds" of their product databases and when users search for a product, the links to the different advertisers for that particular product appear, giving more prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting the user sort by price to see the lowest priced product and then click on it to buy. These engines are also called Product comparison engines or Price comparison engines.

Noteworthy PPC Product search engines are: BizRate.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, and Shopping.com.

Service PPCs

"Service" engines let advertisers provide feeds of their service databases and when users search for a service offering links to advertisers for that particular service appear, giving prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting users sort their results by price or other methods. Some Product PPCs have expanded into the service space while other service engines operate in specific verticals.

Noteworthy PPC services include NexTag, SideStep, and TripAdvisor.

Pay per call

Similar to pay per click, pay per call is a business model for ad listings in search engines and directories that allows publishers to charge local advertisers on a per-call basis for each lead (call) they generate. The term "pay per call" is sometimes confused with "click to call". Click-to-call, along with call tracking, is a technology that enables the “pay-per-call” business model.

Pay-per-call is not just restricted to local advertisers. Many of the pay-per-call search engines allows advertisers with a national presence to create ads with local telephone numbers.

According to the Kelsey Group, the pay-per-phone-call market is expected to reach US$3.7 billion by 2010.

Welcome

nospam@example.com (Steve Monas) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 02:39:20 -0500

I am Freelance Business Development and E-Commerice Professional, who is available for Consulting Services in San Diego, CA. Use the Contact Form to send me a request.

Books: Currently have several books in publication, and more books being produced on various topics. Please review the side panel for more information. The books are published by BookSurge. Currently available through Amazon.com, Borders.com, Target.com, Abebooks.com, Alibris.com, BooksinPrint.com, GlobalBooksinPrint.com, Baker & Taylor. The technology behind books has changed. I outsource the content writing of the books from several different countries and have them edited in the states along with the cover. Once all of the components are completed, including the layout of the book, I submit them to the publisher. I had chosen BookSurge for several reasons, including the global online distribution and royalty program. I keep all of the rights of the books that I create, from content, to distribution.

Websites: I have implemented Serendipity blog application for all of my book websites, except for BuckyRules.com (yes, I am into nano technology, too), which is using a MediaWiki. For other sites, I have either purchased a Website Template or created one (DGSurf.com - I use phpadsnew for the integrated banner management interface and tracking system for gathering statistics) myself. When choosing an open source application, the best place to start looking is SourceForge.net.

OutSourcing: I have been working with RentACoder for the past 3 years. Rent a coder is an international marketplace where people who need custom software developed can find coders in a safe and business-friendly environment. Buyers can cherry pick from a pool of 161,895 coders...enabling them to hire a coder across the country or across the globe…from the comfort of their computers. Buyers who wish to hire internationally, can take advantage of favorable overseas exchange rates, resulting in work being done for 50-90% less than if the project were done in-country. Coders are also given access to a huge pool of potential work and have the ability to work independently from their homes rather than for a company.

---FYI about Outsourcing: "Things that make American talent valuable - open-mindedness, a willingness to take risks, flashes of ingenuity - can't be reduced to a spec sheet and emailed from Hyderabad. If more Americans develop such abilities, the use of international programmers could even improve our economic outlook. Outsourcing isn't going away, but in the end, America may be stronger for it" (Quote taken from Wired 12-2006 by Daniel H. Pink). ---I will be outlining more about Rentacoder, and other outsourcing your virtual office in my upcoming book ShoeString Venture: Entrepreneurs Guide to the 21st Century.

Movie Business

nospam@example.com (Steve Monas) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:09:39 -0500

The Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide: A Business and Legal Sourcebook

Steve Monas

Affiliate Marketing

Outsourced Program Management

SEO

Pay Per Click

Keyword PPCs

Product PPCs

Service PPCs

Pay per call

Welcome

Movie Business

General Business

Civilization

Spirituality

E-Commerce Programming

Music Business

Jim Collins

Bill Gates

Alvin Toffler

Brian Green

Carl Sagan