DISQUS

Shawn, Great video. That really was a Who's Who of affiliate marketing! Looking forward to seeing everyone in Las Vegas in less than 2 months!

Shawn, you forgot about Christmas time delivery to the boonies. I live in Eagle, Colorado and have to drive through the ice and snow each day to retrieve my mail. No mailbox delivery for me. I just got your postcard today announcing the "gift" and drove back through the raging blizzard as fast as I could to respond. By then it was already past 3 PM EST.

BTW: Lots of powder days on the slopes so far!

Can't wait for Affiliate Summit and then the almost as equally famous Affiliate Snow Summit afterwards!

Totally agreed on your views on the ascension of Kerri to the top job at CJ.

A real pro in the top job in the industry.

Since I manage a number of programs I get lots of feedback from all sides- affiliates and merchants. At CJU 2006, CJ admitted that 60-70% of all sales were being generated by PPC affiliates. And, I know a lot of them didn't worry about coupon codes, so the sales were pretty straight up (a whole other line of discussion).

This year across all of my programs I have seen a huge surge/success in coupon sites. I would say that couponers have gone from 20% of sales volumes to 30% and higher of my sales volumes. PPC affiliates are still extremely important, but couponing has really gained marketshare. Hence I am giving them much more attention.

I have not seen a corresponding surge in content sites.

Going along with all of this is I am hearing lots of squawks from my merchants that their Google campaigns are not converting as well as in the past. I am getting more emphasis on what I am doing and contributing to the online success of my merchants than ever before as they try to "replace" sales being lost in their PPC campaigns.

So a question.

1. Have other merchants been complaining about Google conversion rates going down recently? (I have one PPC affiliate that won't use Google analytics in some verticals because he thinks they can control the quality of the traffic that gets sent to his sites and conversions as a result.)

2. Have PPC affiliate conversions gone down lately?

Scott, Another train of thought that went through the ShareASale Think Tank was the idea of a "shared" commission. If the content site wrote a review and the consumer didn't buy, but later bought with a coupon code affiliate (or was driven to look for a coupon code as the examples discussed above)... shouldn't the content site receive part of the commission.

Now I am sure there are ways to track this, technically speaking, but you are then asking the affiliate network, the merchant and the affiliates to agree to a whole new set of rules and parameters as to what drives consumer behavior.

A back of the house suggestion made during the Think Tank, and overheard be me, might be for content sites to take a few extra minutes to grab the coupon codes from the sites they are writing about and provide added value to the visitor/consumer that way. As automated as the tools are getting to add relevant coupon codes to sites, this should be relatively easy to do.

Tried to give you a bump and couldn't get it to work, nor could I find you in BumpZee. What gives?

Even though I am a relative newbie Facebooker I am not astounded by valuation. I have made more contacts in a shorter period of time that by doing anything else I have ever done. I went to a recent industry event and introduced myself to a big player in the industry and she remembered my friend request and we were able to easily start a conversation. In my world of face to face relationships driving my digital business what was amazing.

Now as you see the apps coming from all of my friends the boom is just beginning. I haven't seen a killer app, but it exists out there somewhere and it will be coming to you from a Facebook friend soon.

I have been hearing about BlogRush for some time and thought like you. Keep us updated on any success. Most of the blogs I write and I would like more traffic to are very targeted and I am not sure the BlogRush traffic will help me.

Thanks Vinny. I left before this session catching the early morning out of SB. Great seeing you again at CJU. Good luck on new venture too!

Where are all of the party pics? Wasn't this a party boat?

Vinny, I had seen this before, but its impact remains the same as the first time I saw it. Thanks for the not always subtle but thoroughly entertaining reminder of globalization.

Great post. Nice seeing two big guns going at one another. Going to be a real tussle over the coming years.

i just launched an LS program after many launches with Befree, CJ, Shareasale, AvantLink and others. None of these apps subjected me to a security code. The LS Captcha was useless and slowed down my access to the admin area, good riddance. If you had anything to do with removing this annoyance, good for you.

my first befree program was #50. i started negotiating the deal when they had 10 merchants, barnes & noble being one of them. like you i do believe that befree was written for them and then befree was allowed to market at as a separate tool for other merchants.

BTW, picked this up from my Google alert for "Performics." Good work!

I am working with Performics on their new AffiliateDirect product and they are trying to get one of my CJ programs to switch completely to AffiliateDirect. Same issues I am sure Circuit City is involved with only a much larger scale than my client. Good catch.

I think Dickie Boy's response is indicative of what affiliates will do, with or without any corroborating evidence to the contrary that Second Bite doesn't lose the affiliate's ID, they'll abandon the merchant.

Second Bite must proactively prove and then aggreesively assert that they don't remove the affiliate's ID or else a really good tool for the merchant could fail before getting out of the gate.

scott, it also works on any website not just on google. the little blue box shows up and the preview screen pops up. that is really a help as you can preview blog entries or any type of link. really helpful.

downloaded it too. looks like fun and a great tool. thanks for the catch. i'll report back if I can find a "new" use for it that can be monetized. use it for blog preview of a category listing...? not sure there is any money in it, but would sure help the blog search process.

i sent this to my son who is a level 60 with 2 characters. he is thinking about selling them on ebay since 1. his computer blew up and dad wouldn't save him and 2. he is enjoying college more and doesn't have the time to allocate to wow like he did. thanks for the post.

Congrats! I blogged it on Affiliate News Review.

Churn and burn is still widely practiced. Each time there is a cleaning, there is a lull and then more fancy footwork for a couple of months. The issue is related to how much money these guys can make in such a short time. Obviously it is enough to make this kind of practice practicable. Good catch.

Blogged this on AffiliateNewsReview.com. I have always liked the ShareASale guys though I haven't used the program too much. Giving them a little publicity is no problem.

www.affgoo.com/feed
www.affiliatenewsreview.com/feed

Great idea! Thanks

I was fortunate enough to have a lengthy conversation with Dave Taylor discussing blogging. He said his number one tip to bloggers was to comment on other people's blogs. He encouraged bloggers to spend more time commenting, and by that he meant participating, than blogging. While that may not be possible or practical the intent of being an active participant in the blogosphere of your target audience is without a doubt an important factor in the growth of "your" own work.

And with the knockout list of quality people commenting on this blog you can see that success is following successful people. Thanks to Adam Viener for pointing me to you.

Why you've even got Shmuly!