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Well, it's that time to get ready for Affiliate Summit. I'm on a 6am flight to Las Vegas tomorrow and am looking forward to meeting many of you at the conference over the next few days.
If you are planning on being there and would like to connect, please drop me a line at: Gene [at] AffiliateBrand.com.
Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!
I have been using Google Alerts for quite a while now but only recently have realized that I am truly addicted to them.
For those of you who do not know, Google Alerts allow you to specify any term and will send you an email notification as soon as any web site publishes new content with that term. You can set up to receive these notifications weekly, daily, or as soon as they happen.
As an Internet marketer, I must stay on top of what is happening on the Internet and especially any discussion about me, my site, or topics I cover.
With Google alerts, I do not have to sit and press the refresh button on my browser 50 times a day to see if any new content I care about has appeared on the Internet. I get notified, fairly quickly, about this content via email by Google.
This is the "Push" technology from the 1990's done right. If any of you link to this story, mention my name or my site, I will be notified. I will visit your site and read your post. I am quite likely to leave you a "thank you" comment. You will also be on my radar screen and I may subscribe to your feed.
As many of you know, I launched a new service recently by which I will notify any of you who are customers of Amazon Associates affiliate program the moment Amazon posts a new earnings report for the day. Because of the unpredictable timing of when these reports would be made available, you have previously had to go to Amazon Associates Central and keep hitting the refresh key while waiting for the reports to post ... every day. With my new service, you no longer need to.
Connection between my new service and Google Alerts became obvious to me in the last couple of days. Both are simple notification services of information you care about and these notifications alleviate you from the need to poll for that information. So the next question that I started to think about is... what else can be automated the same way?
I check Alexa data frequently to see the latest traffic volume to my site. I know Alexa's data is not live because I frequently visit Alexa to see no changes. Wouldn't it be nice to get an automated notification when Alexa data does change? What about receiving the Technorati blog rank rating changes with the information as to what new blogs are linking to my site? What about getting an alert any time my Google PageRank changes so that I don't need to go back and check it frequently? What about getting notification if my site's relative Google search result position changes for a particular search term? What about my blog's subscription counts from Feedburner? A friend of mine mentioned that he would love to get a notification when he receives a new bid on his eBay auction, a service not currently available.
Suddenly, there seem to be dozens of new and interesting notifications that could be developed. What do you think may be a valuable notification service to you?
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In Part 1 of this post I described what an Affiliate Cookie is and what its lifetime means for affiliate sales. Clearly, as affiliates, we all want to have the longest possible affiliate cookie lifetime. That's because the longer an affiliate cookie lives, the more sales we are likely to make, especially from those customers who aren't very quick on the purchase trigger.
Cookie lifetime, however, is not the only metric that should matter to affiliates. Continue reading on AffiliateBrand.com
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Most of us know what an Internet cookie is. It is a small parcel of text that a web server would command your browser to save off until the next time the same browser visits the same web domain. At that time the browser is to send the exact same piece of text back to the server. This cookie is typically placed on your computer by web sites you visit and is done quietly, most of the time without you even being aware of this event. Cookies pose no harm to your computer or to your privacy other than to indicate to the web server when the same browser returns back to the site.
These cookies also have a lifetime associated with them. Some are immediate session cookies. These cookies are only in existence until the user closes the browser window. Other cookies may have expiration on them. They will be saved on your computer's hard drive and sent back to the web server by the browser until a certain date specified by the server when the cookie was originally provided to the browser.
So what is an Affiliate Cookie and what is meant by an Affiliate Cookie Life? Continue reading on AffiliateBrand.com
Because the reports are posted daily, they are not live. You cannot obtain any data for the current day until the following day when Amazon posts its daily report. Amazon Associates reports for a particular day are typically due by 9am on the following day. Frequently, these reports are posted even earlier. Sometimes, these reports come in very late, especially on days of heavy traffic to Amazon.com. The reason why reports are posted at unpredictable times is that Amazon must run a batch process that parses its web logs for any session that is tagged with an affiliate transaction. This process is dependent on computer load, traffic volume, and sometimes glitches in parsing code. Because Amazon Associates is the oldest, the largest, and the most successful affiliate program on the Internet, over 1 Million affiliates are dependent on Amazon for their earnings. Waiting for reports may not be the best use of time for any affiliate, and many of you have expressed frustration on Amazon bulletin boards and in your blogs. To alleviate the need for frequent visits to Amazon Associates Central, AffiliateBrand has introduced an email notification service that will notify you by email the moment Amazon Associates report is posted. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Effective today, Amazon Associates program is shedding its archaic quarterly payment system and opting in for the new, more competitive monthly payment system. One big concern that many associates have is exemplified by a recent post LiewCF made on his Blog titled Amazon Associates Pays Monthly. In his post LiewCF writes:
| However, as part of this change, referral fee tiers will be adjusted to reflect monthly item quantities. Meaning, you need to make more sales in a month to earn higher referral rate. .... I would rather wait for late but bigger check. How about you? |
Actually, Amazon did address this concern. In its effort to shift to a monthly payment schedule, Amazon has lowered its payment tiers as well. Compare the old quarterly payment tiers with the new monthly payment tiers:
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| Quarterly Payment Tiers |
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| Monthly Payment Tiers |
As you can see, Amazon has cut quantity of items you need to make it into the next tier by roughly a third in order to align with its accelerated payment frequency. For example, while you had to sell 21 items per quarter in the past in order to jump from 4% to 6% in commissions, you now need to sell 7 items per month in order to make the same jump.
So you should definitely not be losing commissions in the new Amazon monthly payment model.
Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!
According to Wikipedia, a Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications.
Social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace, as well as blogging engines have popularized the use of widgets as means by which millions of social networking aficionados share everything from music and video to various statistics of their web sites.
What made web widgets so popular is their ease of integration into various web sites and blogging platforms. Six Apart Inc., developers of TypePad, was one of the first to introduce a functionality by which widget designers could make it strikingly easy for TypePad users to integrate widgets into their blogs. Example of a widget is MyBlogLog's "View Reader Community" widget that you can find towards the bottom of the left sidebar of my blog.
Sites such as YouTube and iFilm.com have made widgets very easy to grab and put on any site. You can simply grab the HTML code for the widget and place it right on your site. Copying and pasting the HTML code is very simple as well. Take a look at how easy YouTube and iFilm made it for you to copy the HTML code to place a video on your site.
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| YouTube Embed Mechanism | iFilm.com Embed Mechanism |
Surprisingly, affiliate programs have not caught on to the widget bandwagon -- yet. I strongly believe that this is the next direction for the Internet affiliate programs. One of the toughest challenges for today's merchants is getting their program noticed by super-affiliates, those affiliates capable of driving significant sales. Making it easy for them to grab a code widget, whether from the merchant's site or from another affiliate's site will make both, merchants' marketing job and affiliate implementation job so much easier.
Lawrence Coburn of sexywidget.com recently gave a great overview of the five characteristics that each widget should have in his post titled Building a Widget? Read this First. I fully agree with his analysis that every widget should have
1. Accessibility. Widgets must be formatted properly for the space they are designed to fit.
2. Customization. Widgets must be customizable by the webmaster to fit the overall look/feel of his site.
3. Content / Experience. Widgets must provide a good experience for the reader.
4. Branding. Widgets must offer branding to the merchant.
5. Sharing. Widgets must be easy to for the reader to copy from the site he is reading and place them on his own site.
The last point is the most important in my perspective since this feature allows viral marketing of the merchant's affiliate program. Yet very few merchant affiliate programs offer this capability. The easier merchants can make it for potential affiliates to become affiliates, the more affiliates they will have. Furthermore, any business that a new affiliate brings to the merchant via the widgets they copied from the original affiliate's site should be credited in terms of second-tier fees to the original affiliate. This will give affiliates plenty of financial incentives to display merchant's widgets on their sites.
Today, merchants create too many barriers in their attempt to sign up new affiliates. Widgets are perfect for breaking down these barriers. I expect many more widgets to become staples of mainstream affiliate programs in the months to come.
Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!
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