Neverblue Sticks It To Affiliates On Christmas Eve December 25, 2009
Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 6 commentsIf you’re a Neverblue affiliate, you’d have received this cheery email within the last couple of hours:
Attention Affiliates:
Beginning January 1st 2010, Neverblue will transition its Affiliate based referral program. The program will be changing from 2% commissions for life, to 2% commissions for 6 months. Please note that all existing referrals will be honored until June 30th 2010.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact your Affiliate Manager.
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Aside from missing out the “Merry Christmas/Chanuka/Hannukah/Happy Holidays” greeting, it’s a nice disincentive to recruit affiliates to a network you enjoy working with.
Given that it takes some affiliates 1-2 months to get their bearings and set up a profitable campaign up and running, there’s no “lifetime value” to talk about. I guess the onus is on CPA networks to differentiate themselves from the other 400+ of them out there and figure out how to recruit new affiliates/reactivate old affiliates besides having a round of Playboy playmate dates, trips to the North Pole on a cold-war era ice breaker ship (pretty cool), or a Hummer to the top affiliate.
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Will other CPA networks follow suit?
Inevitably a couple will, and retract it shortly after. CPA networks who’ve already achieved a sizable affiliate base will continue to see more than half of their revenue (maybe as high as 70-90% depending on the network) generated by their top 100 affiliates, so it might not make a difference at the end of the day.
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Perhaps this is good too, given that the major PPC networks have been giving the thumbs down to arbitrage affiliates. The new year could see more marketers diversify their earnings outside of merely being affiliates/associates/distributors into creating products, services and networks which they control.
Noel, noel, noel, noel.
Popularity: 8%
The Blitzkrieg Model Of Affiliate Marketing December 17, 2009
Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 11 commentsLast week, PPC.biz’s Barman tweeted a Wired article about the video content creation strategy of Demand Media, which holds lessons for marketers: bank on the first mover advantage hard, especially if you want to grab market share and mind share.
That’s not to say that you should put out the poorest quality stuff you can just to get a campaign out the door. But on the internet, speed accounts for a lot, but not everything. (Just ask Windows about their Vista operating system or Apple about their Newton PDA).
The lesson here is if you’re the first in the space, whether it’s with FB ads, MySpace MyAds, or the recently launched Plenty of Fish (PoF) self-serve ad system, you’re going to have leeway and freedom to see a period of fat profits (together with a bout of accompanying frustration with broken features, tracking).
An affiliate has said of PoF’s ad “I could shit diarrhea more consistent than PoFs traffic” alluding to an ad which reported 3,000 impressions, 500 clicks, though the network stats reported 60 clicks.
At the same time, other affiliates are reporting (more…)
Popularity: 8%
The Rise and Death of SEO, PPC and Everything Else… December 9, 2009
Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 9 commentsUnless you’ve been sleeping at the wheel, the last couple of weeks have been turbulent ones for many PPC affiliates, especially Adwords users. There’s been a spat of account bans (as discussed in my internet marketing forum), and even though Nick Fox told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz that suspended Adwords advertisers can send an email to initiate an “appeals process”, the anecdotal evidence suggests that aside from canned email responses, affiliates suspended from Adwords can do little more than post a bitchy post on their blog, or create a complaint thread on one of a number of public and private marketing forums. So is this the beginning of the end of PPC?
It’s easy to go the Fox Mulder route and assume that they’re out to get you (which isn’t paranoia if someone is really out to get you…). I think it has to do with the natural process of evolution. Let’s look at search engine optimization (SEO) for a second.
Remember the old days (ie: the early 1990s) when SEO meant you stuffed (more…)
Popularity: 9%
Friday Podcast: Business Automation Strategies With Seth Turin December 5, 2009
Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , add a comment
Seth Turin is developer of the UBot automation software, which enables you to compile internet marketing processes, such as niche/keyword/offer research, campaign setup, optimization, into executable scripts (also known as “bots”). While bots are most commonly associated with the search engine indexing GoogleBot and the blackhat SEO’s bot spamming/bot networks, savvy marketers will find lots of uses to enhance their business through the process of automation.
I invited Seth to come on the podcast to share his insights on how technology can be used to expand business activity and ultimately increase sales and profits.
During the course of our conversation, Seth also talked about:
- How he got started in the industry, including early spamming efforts
- How you can use technology effectively and a strategy to plan out the process
- What types of tasks you should automate
- How UBot was developed and how it works
- Ideas for creating your own bots
Check out the podcast below:
Links:
- Ubot on Twitter
- Ubot secret coupon page [Use code “wiaw199ubot” to give yourself a $46 discount).
Popularity: 10%
Avast Showing “Win32:Delf-MZG [Trj]” errors? Read Here December 3, 2009
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , 24 commentsIf you’re using Avast’s Anti-Virus solution on any of your home computers, you may throwing the program is throwing up reports of your .exe files being infected by “Win32:Delf-MZG [Trj]“. This threw me for a loop, because I’m pretty careful when it comes to data mangement.
Before you start deleting .exe’s or putting them into a chest, you should know that the latest anti-virus definition update is said to contain some bugs which is causing false positives to register.
The word from those following the anti-virus industry is to avoid running Avast for now, till another definition update is released to fix this issue. Hopefully this is done in the next 24-48 hours.
PS: It might be a cause for a freakout if you see a string of trojan/malware warnings, but you are regularly backing up data on your desktop/laptop, aren’t you?
Update: Blackhatworld forum post with info on the situation.
Popularity: 16%
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