In the online advertising industry, affiliates and networks are always looking to promote the next best campaign. But just like any other trend, when an offer saturates the market, affiliates and consumers alike begin rolling their eyes at it. Before you know it, a new campaign is born, marketed, sold…then inevitably, dismissed.

(Moment of silence for the fallen soldiers, the hoodias, the pedi paws, the ped egg.)…

It doesn’t take long to notice the real trend.

Reinvention.

Very rarely do you see a campaign that’s so novel, it blows you away. Most campaigns that have died have reincarnated. Granted, they’ve had a bit of a facelift, but the idea of the campaign is still intact.

For example, diet and continuity offers have pretty much ran their course in the US. But advertise it in another country, and your conversions potentially skyrocket. Or take car insurance lead gen campaigns, where the consumer fills out a page of contact info – they became so oversaturated in the market, that affiliates stopped running them. Now, car insurance campaigns with just an email submit or state drop down convert considerably better.

If you’re an advertiser and you notice that affiliates haven’t ran your campaign in a while or that EPCs have declined, think about what you can do to freshen it up a bit.

Need help coming up with ideas? Gimme a shout and I’ll be more than happy to transform your oldie campaign into a goodie again!

I had the privilege of co-hosting with a certain favorite nerdy affiliate of mine (Jasper P), and Affiliate Director Extraordinaire, one miss Shanti “Breakdancer” Beaurline. Despite the overcast weather, we saw a phenomenal turnout of 40+ local affiliates (quite possibly the largest one yet), and a number of extra special guests, including In addition to sipping bootleg sangria poolside and noshing on cupcakes made by yours truly in honor of Roland and Feldo of Tracking 202’s birthdays (I swear, everything was fat free!), we enjoyed a number of local celebs.

There were guest appearances by Roland Navarro, Feldo Nartapura and Alex Tsatkin of the Tracking 202 team, fellow 202 team member Justin Barr aka the international Man o’ Mystery behind Affbuzz (and lesser-known but equally enlightening hotanalerruptions.com), Ryan Pamplin and Kandi Onwuama of Ryactive, a certain Miss Pink Deals.net, AKMG President Kim White and CEO Steven Patton, and the infamous Miss Chilli Chorizo.

The hilight of the meetup of course was our speakers session. Ryan Pamplin of Ryactive and Alex Tsatkin of Tracking202 gave short presentations, jump-starting our creativity, re-motivating us to work even harder, and allowing us look at affiliate marketing thru a different lens.

Ryan Pamplin, founder of the performance marketing company Ryactive, has been a serial entrepreneur for almost a decade and boasts a diverse curriculum vitae in videogame development, laptop computer manufacturing and several internet marketing startups. Ryan shared his views on why his team-based business model equips them for success, the importance of creating a sustainable lifestyle, managing assets and upholding ethics in affiliate marketing.

Currently working as an Affiliate Manager at Revolution202. Alex Tstatkin has worked with Fortune 1000 companies including Adobe and SanDisk to scaling his own affiliate business. His expertise lies in SEO, PPC, Display, and Social Media. Alex shared some tasty tidbits on how to make the most out of your Facebook SocialAds campaign (and a few secrets on how to increase the probability your ad gets approved). Both super affiliates gave excellent insights, and I encourage you to drop them a line with questions of your own.

Of course, what AKMG-related [but not officially affiliated, endorsed or sponsored by] event would be complete without the world-famous skate boards? We raffled off autographed pre-release, autographed decks of the final installment of AKMG’s limited-edition Gary Taxali series skate deck. If you aren’t signed up as an AKMG affiliate yet (perhaps you live under a rock?) than I highly recommend you do so, post haste. These custom decks are reserved only for our active affiliates so sign up to secure your deck for Ad Tech New York!

At the most recent 202 Meetup that AKMG co-hosted here in LA, we had Alex Tsatkin speak on the topic of running offers on Facebook. He brought up a good point that I think I should have everyone be aware of, if they are not already. Most networks set up international redirects on their offers, meaning if an offer is being displayed out of the intended geo target, then another offer will be displayed in its place so not to waste the traffic. This means it is best to use the actual url instead of the tracking link during the approval process so you do not risk having an unrelated offer be displayed during the approval process. You should do this for both domestic and international offers- just because Facebook may outsource some of their approval process, so you never know where the person is that is viewing your ad. Once the ads are approved switch to your affiliate link.

Internet advertising is a relatively creative industry. It’s all about thinking outside the box to attract the consumer. Additionally, in online advertising you have to attract the affiliates to run the advertising. So not only is the uniqueness of the product important, but so is the nature of the advertisement…and its payout to the affiliate.

Typically, the campaigns presented to me are lead generation, free trials, or purchases. Most of my day consists of enthusiastic (and not so enthusiastic) advertisers pitching me one of these three types of offer. I often ask myself, “Why don’t advertisers try to mix it up?” Why not make the campaign a hybrid – pay us (and therefore the affiliate) on the lead submitted as well as a portion of the sale…if a sale is generated?

As sparingly as I see them, it’s a brilliant idea. For example, if the “offer” is first page lead gen submit, but the consumer can actually purchase the product on the second page, the advertiser should consider a marginal payout to the affiliate network on the back end.

There’s no doubt that this will involve a bit more effort from the advertiser, but it is worth the effort! Since a pixel is not actually firing when a purchase is made, keeping track of who to pay out and how much will be more of a manual process. But if it’s the difference of an affiliate running the campaign or not (because they’ve already ran 15 lead gen biz ops this month), it’s worth it. The sales can be added manually to the tracking system as a bonus to the affiliate who has already been compensated on the first page lead gen submission.

In the end, this model is a win-win for both parties. Affiliates make money on both the lead and the purchase, and advertisers get more traffic on a campaign that an affiliate may not have ran otherwise.

If you’re an advertiser and this sounds like a novel idea for your campaign, let me know and I will work with you to make it a success!

As all affiliate marketers know, time is money. And we all have the same number of days in a month, hours in a day, and minutes in an hour, and yet some utilize it better than others.

Every morning I start my day checking stats, catching up on email and skimming Affbuzz. Yesterday, skimming it’s top stories I came across ppc.bz, and I must say, I was impressed with Barman’s two-part blog on why you need to stop wasting time and start working. Surely written whilst Barman was on a full-blown caffeinated bender, his two articles are chock full of great advice (and alas, chock full of his signature flowery language). But I digress….

I like the focus of the article, and I want to extend a few more nuggets to help you along your way to be as productive as possible in your affiliate marketing endeavors. First suggestion? Become a creature of habit. Just as affiliates optimize marketing campaigns, optimize your day and stick with the winning formula.

Organize your day unto blocks of time, and stick to your schedule. Whether you are in email, ppc, social media or display ads, you are going to need to do research, speak with others in our industry, work on the actual production of your campaigns and analyze results.

Think of these tasks as blocks of time. During your time blocks, focus purely on what you designated that time to do. Set your aim to away, turn off distractions, and stop checking your facebook. Since affiliate marketers are vampires and never seem to sleep, think about which blocks of time during the day you are most productive: are you a morning person or a night owl?

Measure how much you in vest in each of these blocks and try to keep them in proportion with each other. Never let one component of your time far outbalance the others - you will never finish any of your projects and surely be frustrated.

If something can be done in five minutes or less, say an email or a piece of production, just get it out of the way and be done and done. If not? Add it to the list, prioritize and tackle in bite size chunks.

I don’t know about you markateers, but many of us fall prey to time sucks (cough::facebook/twitter/youtube::cough). These are time wasters that steal us from time we could be using more productively. Use your time blocks wisely, and when you work on your particular projects don’t allow yourself to stray toward those time suck weaknesses.

That’s it for now my affiliate affectionados, alas, I’m out of time.

E

Thanks to technology and innovation, online advertising is an ever-growing industry. The possibilities and ideas that contribute to the success of the online space are endless. Those of us who work in this space are fortunate enough to be in an industry with such potential.

But I don’t think we take the time to realize how fortunate we really are. We become so caught up in figuring out how to capitalize on the daily online consumer, that we forget the internet is a luxury. We forget that the consumer’s purchasing power is a luxury. As a result, we forget our jobs are a luxury.

With the state of the economy, we don’t all have the financial resources we used to. But that’s no excuse. There are plenty of other ways to give: your time, old clothing, canned foods, books, etc. And I guarantee that whatever you choose to contribute as an individual, it will consequently improve the lives of many.

At AKMG, we’re ramping up our philanthropic endeavors. We have made a pledge, as a company, to donate to one charity organization a month and feature them on our website. It puts a smile on our faces knowing that our hard work provides us with the means to help out others around the world.

Now more than ever, we all need to take a step back and put our lives into perspective. If you are able to read this blog, you are blessed with more resources than the majority of people on this planet. Having these privileges grants you the responsibility to give back to the less privileged in our world.

Here are a few websites that can help connect you to some great charity organizations:

Everyone will agree that online gambling is one of the most lucrative online businesses next to the adult industry and is expected to continue to grow. The casino space is mature, saturated and competitive. Bingo is a unique approach to online gaming because it targets a whole different demographic. Historically online gaming targets men, however Bingo appeals to women and silver surfers (over 65ers) with free time - who incidentally spend the most time online, 4 more hours than the most active internet users according to a recent study.

Bingo offers users a social environment that allows players to interact with each other. People not only go there to gamble but they go there to make friends and chat on a daily basis with other regular bingo players. As you can see this is allows affiliates a unique angle to market online gaming.

If you haven’t tried to diversify affiliate campaign portfolio, maybe online Bingo is something to consider. We recently launched 2 very good international bingo offers that pay on a download. Ask our affiliate managers for suggestions on how to market these programs.

Blame it on the 365 days of Socal sunshine, but I can’t believe the summer slipped away from us so quickly. This week I was pleasantly surprised to find Starbucks selling my favorite Pumpkin Spice latte (and decidedly unpleasantly surprised to be greeted with back-to-school traffic), and I can’t help but think of all the fall holidays upon us, ready to be marketed!

Fall means football and good food. Immediately, I think of our football-focused creatives for Dish Network and DirecTV and anything collegiate to flesh out your autumn affiliate marketing portfolio. Fall also means that holidays are just around the corner so start building your Halloween, Thanksgiving and yes even Christmas sites now so you are ready for the rush. Affiliates, stop messing with your fantasy drafts and swap out general creatives for the holiday versions and revamp your keywords and content keeping the following in mind.

- Halloween - Costumes, candy, safety, decorations, e-cards, halloween movies available on Blockbuster, etc.
- Thanksgiving - Recipes, samples, crafts, family, dinner invitations, and yes, more football.
- Christmas - As Seen on TV gifts, wine-of-the-month clubs, Christmas party invitations, diet for the holiday weight gain and looming New Year’s resolutions ahead, anything that will save the last-minute shopper time and money.

So raise your pumpkin spice lattes with me and toast to a profitable fall!

Tsarina of Blogistein…

You’re an affiliate marketer or an affiliate network operator. You deal with massive amounts of data and data relationships every single day. You often find yourself not only having to receive certain data but having to send back data to your partners, post conversion.

The passing back of data to your partners or clients might seem pretty rudimentary, but you’d be very surprised to find out that many tracking systems lack a comprehensive version of this functionality because of variable scope issues.

Variable scope is basically a set of rules that defines where one can and can not access a variable. About.com explains it best here, “you can’t define a variable at any spot in the program and use it at any spot, there is a specific relationship between where a variable is defined and where it can be used.” What this means for your tracking platform is that any data that is required to be ’sent back’ to your partner/client through a pixel or any other means must be within the ’scope’ of that end-pass or end-population.

Example:
- A publisher sends a value to you through your tracking URL and needs it passed back to their pixel.
- If this value, passed into a parameter in the initial URL, is definable and in the scope of the pixel, you can pass it back without a problem.

I won’t go into specific implementations here, because the definition and handling of local and global variable scopes varies from framework to framework. The logic, per the above, however, will never change.

If your current system doesn’t allow much flexibility for data handling, you may want to consider switching software!

With the popularity of YouTube sweeping the globe, it was only time before YouTube began figuring out a way to offer full length movie viewings via the internet. YouTube wants to offer movie rentals by obtaining the licenses to stream feature films in rental format. According to the Wall Street Journal, YouTube is in talks with Sony Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., and Warner Bros. Studios about get these licenses.

YouTube has been trying to obtain more professionally made content (hence the new High Def button on some YouTube clips). With the popularity of other competitor sites like Netflix offering HD quality videos, YouTube was almost forced in this ‘movie rental’ direction just to keep up to par. Some insiders are saying that no deals have been struck and that this is all in the early stages of development. YouTube has now over 100 million users and the potential ad revenue that YouTube can offer would be epic to the affiliate marketing community.