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Affiliate Classroom Blog Archives

Who Creates The Web?

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 6:03 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

Ok, I confess, the title is disingenuous. Everyone knows no single entity dominates, much less creates, the web. But if anyone was still in doubt on that point, the latest Pew Internet study should finally put the issue to rest.

According to Wendy Davis’ story on Online Media Daily:

“As of last December, 35 percent of Americans had posted to a blog, created a Web page, shared online photos, or otherwise generated content. That proportion is more than double the 16 percent that had posted any content to the Web in January 2002, when Pew first researched the topic.”

That translates to 48 million Americans, according to ClickZ’ Enid Burns.

Not only are the base numbers increasing, but the demographic spread is widening. It isn’t just young, techno-savvy web geeks anymore, it’s everybody.

That shouldn’t be too surprising, considering the growth of social networks over the past few years. MSN Spaces, for example, now has more than 100 million unique visitors, according to comScore Media Matrix data.

And, says Hitwise, MySpace.com now constitutes 8.7% of Google’s traffic, the largest single source. (Hardly any wonder, then, that the two companies are rumored to be in talks on some kind of deal.)

It’s anybody’s guess — because I sure don’t have a good one — what happens after everyone is talking and showing everything to everyone in every way. But there’s no need to guess about one likely result: More dollars for affiliate marketers who cash in on the trend toward non-traditional advertising.

So the answer to the question of the title, at least in part, would be: you do.

Commission Junction Changes Their Links…

Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 12:25 pm by Anik Singal

Commission Junction Changes Their Links…

This is major news. CJ has announced that they are changing from HTML links to Javascript links. What does this mean?

Well, instead of having links that you would use typically, you will now have to place “coding” into the page for a link.

What does this mean to you?

Well the way you insert links is completely different now. Affiliate links are becoming a bit more like Adsense links. They will be “fed” directly onto your site by CJ.

Some of the implications are that this does give the merchant/CJ much more control over your site and what is actually showing (as in the text for the link - not as easy to change any more as just changing a few html text).

However, CJ is still saying that they will allow affiliates to control text and look/feel over the links - but havn’t exactly said how that will be possible.

Also, if you use data feeds or have a comparison shopping website, it is still unclear how easily you’re going to be able to automatically have JAVA links inserted.

Now for all you e-mail and PPC affiliates

You don’t need “me” telling you that you can’t exactly insert JAVA script into an e-mail or into a Google Ad…

CJ’s response is that they WILL still have HTML links for you to use - but they will be case by case and monitored to make sure they are not being used on websites.

There is NO way they can completely eliminate PPC affiliates - way too much revenue comes from there, they’d probably cut their revenue in half!

When does all this go into effect? June 23…
When do the HTML links go Bye-Bye? No announcement yet…

What are my feelings on this change? To be honest, I’m not sure yet - but definitely something to watch…

Mobile Makes Great Platform for Podcasts

Saturday, May 27th, 2006 at 5:00 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

The web is growing in every conceivable direction. Total number and demographic spread of users, international reach, variety of technologies, you name it. One of the most rapidly growing, and most interesting, markets is mobile video.

Out of a total U.S. Internet population of 172 million, more than 2 million subscribe to mobile TV, according to Telephia data reported by ClickZ master of statistics, Enid Burns. (23% of those are Hispanic users, a very under served, but very active, Internet demographic.)

In China, mobile users have outnumbered fixed-line users there since October 2003. They now number nearly 417 million, according to data from the Ministry of Information. (A questionable source, but made plausible by figures from other sources. In particular, eMarketer reports Informa data showing over 376 million mobile phone users in China, compared to 208 million in the U.S.)

Though the latest Hollywood blockbuster probably isn’t great source material for a cell phone (and they don’t serve in-program ads anyway), there are other options — options more useful to affiliate marketers.

Video or audio podcasts make perfect content for those small screens and they are well integrated with both local search and contextual ads. Heidi Cohen has some excellent tips in a recent ClickZ column on how to make a podcast that attracts business. That advice doesn’t depend on serving the content solely to a desktop or laptop user, either.

With Microsoft looking to bring classified ads to China with Live Expo, the triple witching hour may just be approaching.

MySpace In Talks With Google, Microsoft

Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 5:22 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

MySpace is reported to be in talks with either Google or Microsoft for a deal to provide enhanced search and ads to the MySpace community.

Emphasis on that word ‘community’.

Social networks, blogs, and the like, began with the goal of sharing opinions, experiences, and so forth online. They’ve met that goal and then some. Social networks are not just the latest hyped buzzword, but an online reality worth, potentially, billions in ad revenue.

Obviously, both Google and Microsoft know this. (Yahoo! is reportedly less interested. Maybe they were turned off by the process carried out among the Big Three over AOL.) So does Rupert Murdoch, media mogul and now owner of MySpace. (Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace last year for nearly $600 million.)

Even more than Brin and Page, Murdoch knows how to turn eyeballs into dollar signs. He’s been in the business, like it or not, for decades. Political leanings aside, he turned Fox News from a sleepy also-ran into a serious competitor to the major networks. He turned a failing New York newspaper into a competitor of the vaunted New York Times.

When someone like that gets interested in the web, things change.

How they change in detail is anybody’s guess. But everybody is guessing it will mean some kind of deal that solidifies MySpace’s lead as the largest social network.

I don’t know about other affiliate marketers, but I tend to bet with the guy who has demonstrated he knows how to make a buck out of advertising.

May 2006 Affiliate Classroom On The Stands

Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 2:32 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

If you’re interested in some highly effective “white hat” methods for increasing your AdSense revenues, you’ll want to download the May issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine. In it you’ll find:

* How to cash in on high-paying topics, even in a low-paying niche.
* Ways to find high-paying keywords using Google’s own tools.
* How to change your site design to get higher CTR.
* What pays best - AdSense, Chitika, or Amazon?

Excellent case studies by top-notch AdSense arbitrage and keyword experts.

PLUS THESE EXTRAS:
Click Fraud: Should you be worried?
How Web 2.0 affiliates take data feeds and APIs to new heights.

Online Video Viewing Up, says comScore

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 4:55 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

My stock portfolio convinces me regularly that I have a very limited ability to predict the future. But two fresh news stories suggest that I may have gotten at least one thing right when I talked about online video.

Consumption is up by a healthy 18 percent in the six months from October 2005 to March 2006, according to comScore. And — surprisingly, perhaps — the usage (though not the amount) is about evenly split between men and women.

Add to that statistic another, perhaps even more astounding: 3.7 billion streams were viewed, at an average of 100 minutes per month. (Though males, unsurprisingly, watch more at nearly two hours per month compared to females at one hour twenty minutes.)

Taking the smaller figure as discounting porn, even at an hour per month — with the growth of and low resistance to video ads — that’s equal to the average time spent on search.

As reported by Zachary Rodgers on ClickZ:

“But while certain demographic sets consume more video than others, the report’s biggest surprise is that people from all ages and walks of life are eating it up, according to Erin Hunter, comsCore’s EVP of media and entertainment.
‘There are skews by age, but there isn’t any group that’s not doing it,” she said. “It’s not just college kids. It’s also the older demographic, and clearly it’s males and females both. In terms of content, we see entertainment and sports and news all with pretty strong rates of viewership.’”

Interestingly, the market share percentages — though not the companies nor their order — for providing that video break down along lines similar to search. YouTube is at 43%, MySpace at 24%, Yahoo! At 9,58%, and MSN 9.21%, with Google trailing at 6.48%. (Source: Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews.)

Add to those facts another story that shows Napster’s music increase in sales at 104% and I begin to look downright psychic — which I definitely ain’t. Or so my broker tells me.

Partner Contextual Video Ads With Mobile Music Downloads

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 4:13 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

Google has announced their much-anticipated contextual video ad program. Ads will be displayed as static images, but clicking starts a video with fast-forward, pause, and volume controls. A separate click takes the viewer to the advertiser’s site.

Now’s a perfect time to jump on those video podcast sites and download the tools you need to turn your ads into eye-magnets. You can bid for play in the same way as usual (CPC or CPM) and geo-target locally, nationally, or internationally. So, brush up on the version of English the other country speaks, too.

When you think about content, consider that teens are more graphically and video oriented than adults and they represent between 12 and 15 million shoppers in the U.S. alone. (James Maguire has some excellent tips for designing your site to attract and appeal to teens, here at e-Commerce-guide.com.) The one thing above all else to remember is: keep it interesting. Teens bore easily.

And what’s one of the top things teens buy online? Music, of course. With a cell phone in the hands of nearly every teen, you have an opportunity to direct them to a merchant that allows users to download their favorite tunes. And they’re more willing to pay to download to a mobile phone, than any other service. At $2-3$ a pop for a mobile download, the dollars can add up fast.

Online retail spending is expected to rise to $211 billion in this year ($138 B, excluding travel), and a significant chunk of that will be in music sales. Download some money.

Click Fraud Enters the Big Time

Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 5:33 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

A big botnet is on the loose.

Unlike the ultra-cool robots in science fiction movies, this piece of scumware is out to cheat you of hard earned cash. Linda Buquet of 5 Star Affiliate Programs posted a piece of the story reported (among other places) on Help Net Security.

“PandaLabs has detected a network of computers infected with the bot Clickbot.A, which is being used to defraud ‘pay per click’ systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators. According to the data collected so far, the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).”

Even hackers have turned materialistic these days, and are willing to create payloads that don’t delete files or splash annoying messages, but artificially click ads. They click away, mindlessly making money out of thin ether. But like any non-productive activity, it doesn’t create anything of value — it simply steals from hardworking affiliates.

Fight back.

In our upcoming issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine, Yours Truly discusses the phenomenon and provides some resources and guidance on how to do just that.

Search Engines We Like, Sort Of, Some Days

Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 4:57 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

Activity among the major search engine companies is… well, active.

Yahoo! has redesigned the home page and added a nice feature to local search, by including phone numbers in results. Bill Gates is talking about integrating Internet search into the Windows operating system. (Which, given some of the new features in the upcoming Windows Vista release, Microsoft may well do.) And Google is… doing everything under the sun, as usual.

All this, and more, is part of each of The Big 3’s vow to — let’s be nice now — compete strongly.

Normally, I stay away from recommending one over the other. One major reason is that they all do a great job or a hideous job, depending on your goals.

As a user, Google often provides results I find useful in research. As an affiliate marketer they — let’s be nice again — fall a bit short of being ideal. The same could be said of MSN and Yahoo!. Usually. But today is unusual.

Search on “affiliate marketing” and Affiliate Classroom will come up first in the organic results on MSN and second on Yahoo! We like that. On Google, we fall down at the end of the third page. We, er, like that a lot less. (Of course, all those results could change tomorrow or an hour from now.)

Search on “learn affiliate marketing” and we come up #3 on Google and #2 on, drum roll please, Ask.com. We like that a lot. Ask.com’s CEO Jim Lanzone is promising to make Ask.com a lot better. If Affiliate Classroom’s ranking there is any indication, he’s on the right track as far as we’re concerned.

He’s not aiming to knock Google off the top of the hill (for which we salute his realism), but simply to be better for users (for which we applaud his idealism).

In the recent interview, he said:

“We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share.”

We could quarrel with his terminology, but the idea is sound. That’s not just idealism or realism, that’s good business strategy, since it involves a reachable goal using current resources.

Like a child’s swing, sometimes a modest push at the input side — applied at the right time, in the right way — leads to a large increase in output. Good luck with that, Mr. Lanzone. Sincerely. We’d definitely like to see search engine marketers have another viable alternative.

Nostalgia With Numbers, Internet Style

Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 7:00 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

We recently reported that nearly 800 million persons now use the Internet. According to one recent report, that number may be 20% too low.

eMarketer states that:

“Internet access became available to one billion people worldwide, with approximately 845 million using it regularly.”

Not too many years ago people would say, in a tone of awe and disbelief, that there were one billion people in China. Many who said it were alive when the entire world population wasn’t much more than that.

A little more trivia. In 1906, a first class stamp cost two cents and women in Finland got the right to put in their two cents via the vote. Around the same time the first communication cables were being laid between San Francisco and Asia.

Now, what has all this to do with — to use another nostalgic expression — the price of tea in China? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Today, the Chinese have the largest, single-country, active Internet population (111 million) after the U.S. (175 million). With electronic banking and email, many people no longer bother with stamps at all, and the Finns are second in the number of hours per week they spend online. 195 million households around the world have broadband access, mostly via cable.

All those numbers mean this to affiliate marketers: more traffic and more income from more users in more places around the world.

Things definitely ain’t what they used to be.

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