First off, I’d like to say Happy New Year to everyone! 2007 was an exciting year for AKMG which was when everything began. What started off as a great idea over a dinner conversation to start an Affiliate Network turned quickly into the team researching domain names, tossing around possible company names and contacting our lawyer to draft papers for a new company. Then Advertising Kings Media Group (AKMG) was born…and thankfully the domain name AKMG was available!

The launch of AKMG seemed to be good timing for the state of the industry as a whole. According to feedback we’ve received, there seemed to be room for another affiliate network and people (both advertisers and publishers) were looking for someone new to work with. We kept hearing this repeatedly during ad:tech NY and felt fortunate to be that something “new” in the industry. This fall feels like years ago and AKGM is in full swing with plenty of great offers and quality affiliates.

As things evolve and change in our industry, it is interesting to hear what works for some clients but not for others. As most of us know, email pubs drive huge volume and high quality traffic but so many advertisers are still afraid of email. One of my wishes for 2008 is that advertisers will continue to educate themselves on the value of email marketing and be willing to test different ideas that are “out of the box” from what their company normally does. It’s exciting to see that many more advertisers are embracing affiliate marketing as a part of their online marketing plan. I’ve spoken to a lot of people that used to do affiliate marketing but have stopped over the past few years and are finally getting back into it again. It’s encouraging to see that our industry may have overcome a lot of the stigmatism with spammers, etc that has been associated with affiliate marketing. So my other wish is that many more advertisers will embrace our ideas for successful campaigns and just start including affiliate marketing as a piece of the online puzzle for each campaign.

Here’s wishing you a great 2008!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 7:15 am and is filed under Advertisers, Everything Else, Industry Shows, Publishers, Tara's Blogs, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.