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My posts at my ReveNews.com blog, my Search Engine Journal posts and Cumbrowski.com news all in one. You can subscribe to the combined RSS feed via your favorite Feed Reader or subscribe conveniently via Email.
Carsten Cumbrowski's Blogs and News
12/2/2009
3/17/2009
A visitor of my site who read some of my product data feed resources contacted me with an interesting question about how to deal with availability and SEO issues when you are utilizing merchant product feeds.
If I build a website with an affiliate data feed of an example: 10,000 different digital camera products. How would anyone but myself know that these products are available on my website?
My idea is a simple PHP script site with a CSV data feed file dynamically loaded. Because there won't be any static pages built, how will the search engines see them?
If your pages URLs change all the time (as in appear and disappear = 404 error), you will have a hard time to get pages indexed by search engines. In order to be able to generate the same page for the same product over and over again is it necessary to have an unique product identifier, which could be the merchant SKU or in the case of digital cameras the UPC or EAN (I would use the EAN if you have that).
You don't have to delete pages if a product is out of stock. You could (and probably should) keep the page and indicate that it is out of stock. You have one problem though. You need to know when a product is out of inventory and discontinued (= it will never come with new inventory in a future data feed file). There are three 1/2 options, which all involve the merchant (more or less)
Option 1) The merchant provides ALL products in the feed that he is selling, even the out of inventory one, but indicates the inventory level in a column of the data feed (absolute number or just an indicator e.g. available/out of stock or out-of-stock/back-order/low/available etc.
Option 2) The merchant has a product status that indicate which item is an active SKU that will be replenished or if it is a "discontinued" item. A column for product status would do the trick, like "A" for active and "D" for discontinued.
If a SKU that was in status "D" is not included in the next feed, then you have to delete it, but you keep all products that are in status "A" and just show "out of stock" for them and wait for a future feed with new inventory again.
Option 3) and 1/2 If you don't get any of the above, you can't automate the update properly and should keep the product in the DB until you remove it manually. You either have to check yourself, ask the merchant or the merchant comes and asks for the removal (if he complains, explain to him what the problem is and what he can do about it).
In the case of cameras does it probably make sense to check once or twice a year if old models are still manufactured or not. Call it inventory cleaning day or spring cleaning/preparing for the holidays.
Dynamic Scripts and Search Engines
Now some general notes about the use of Product Data Feeds to generate content pages in an automated fashion.
I did a lot with data feeds in the past and know that they can be a pain-in-the-neck sometimes.
While the technology behind it isn't rocket science, did affiliate networks and merchant manage to screw up pretty much everything there is in the process, leaving it up to the affiliate to deal with those problems. You can't assume anything and should always expect the worse. It does not only sound like a lot of work, it actually is.
I don't want to discourage you, but I want to make sure that your expectations and goals are realistic and that you are ready and willing to spend the time and energy necessary to reach them.
I spent a lot of time to collect and write up resources and information to make it easier for other affiliates to deal with the subject. I also talked to several of the networks about the issues. Most listen, but only few are actually doing something about it.
Data Feed Resources / Suggested Reading
I suggest checking out the entry page on my site that is dedicated to affiliate data feeds.
My posts in this forum thread talk about the requirements and skills needed that are necessary to deal with data feeds from a technical point of view. It also mentions alternatives to the use of raw data feeds that should always be considered. I planned to write something up based on those posts, but did not get around it yet.
I created a write-up that is a good 101 for merchants and affiliates to the subject. It was also based on a forum thread at ABestWeb actually. I strongly suggest to you to read it.
Then I have documentations for the individual networks that provide data feeds. There is no standard, which means that it is up to you to either create a flexible solution and/or you chose to work with data feeds from one source (network in most cases) only.
Regarding SEO and the use of automated scripts to process feeds
Read this article of mine. It's about web templates, but mentions data feed sites as well.
If your goal is to create sites based solely on data feeds and nothing else and expect them to rank anywhere in the search engines and make money off them, look for something else to do.
It is not 2001-2003 anymore. Google caused virtually a genocide among data feed affiliates with their "Florida" update in Fall 2003. Webmerge was the tool of the trade to create those sites (its still available, see my data feed page).
The sites that were build a bit more cleverly were mostly killed off by their "Jagger" update at the end of 2005, followed by their "BigDaddy" infrastructure update in early 2006. My largest data feed based site was among those. I was not doing much SEO at that time anymore, which was part of the reason why I could not prevent the site to get almost entirely washed out of Google's index. There are only a few hundred pages left today, most of them are supplemental.
Making a Data Feed based Site Work Today
You have to add value for the user and content for the search engines in order to make it work. What you also need are a lot of inbound links to your site to be able to keep thousands of pages in the search engine index. This means that some word of mouth and social media marketing should be part of your business plan. It can be done, but it is much harder today than it was back then.
I suggest to concentrate on building a socially friendly site that does not rely as much on search engines and do the SEO work on the side and see the results of it as a nice added bonus, but not an essential part of your business.
You can do what you want. My tips are only well intended to save yourself a lot of time by learning it yourself the hard way and make mistakes that others already did before you.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Cumbrowski.com
1/28/2009
Currently going on at eComXpo.com is the latest installment of the eComXpo virtual tradeshow for internet marketers, which happens entirely online in the realms of cyberspace. No travelling required, no hotel room to book... none of those hassles.
Today is the first day of the show and it will be continued tomorrow. Admission for attendees is absolutely free for all of the 8,000+ expected attendees.
The virtual trade show has all the elements of a real-life event, except for the meeting people face to face, the parties and the hangovers the next day 
. Exhibitors have virtual booth, you have a virtual bag to collect contact information and virtual schwag. You can chat with people at the booths, not just with the folks who run it, but also with the folks who visit it... you can even chat with anybody who runs around on the exhibit hall floors or any of the lounges.
Like a regular trade show, eComXpo has educational sessions, with the difference, that attending them at this virtual conference is free, no "FULL PASS" to access them is required. Just go to eComXpo.com and register and off you go.
If you missed any of the educational sessions already, no worries, because all of the presentations and panel discussions will become available on the eComXpo web site after the show is over. You have to have an account though, which is another good reason to check it out. The session recordings will be available for 90 days, before they will be taken down.
eComXpo is a good training exercise, if you never attended a conference before.
Let me quote a post of my own that I wrote in October 2006 for ReveNews.com.
The eComXpo has a lot of advantages to attract affiliates of all levels:
- The free admission makes it possible for any affiliate to attend regardless of available budget, newbie and super affiliate.
- There is no need to travel to get to the show, you just go to your computer and you are there. You can attend as long as you want, 5 minutes or 5 hours or every hour for 15 minutes. It's up to you or the time available, especially for affiliates that still have a day job.
- Affiliates that can afford to spend the time and money for the trade show pass, flight, hotel, taxi etc. (which is not cheap) have a hard time to believe and see for themselves that the investment is worth it. eComXpo is a good introduction of those Affiliates to the principle of those tradeshows and the opportunities that can come from it.
Entirely virtual Tradeshows like eComXpo will never replace the real live human contact of tradeshows in the real world, not to mention the socializing and networking opportunities at the parties that are organized by show organizer itself and various sponsors.
I used to be one of those affiliates and eComXpo (among other things) made me attend real-life conferences afterwords.
I will be one of the presenters at the event, among many other known figures in this industry. My session will be at the end of Day 1, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 8:20 pm EST. It is a ca. 50 minutes long presentation titled "What Makes a Good Datafeed? Tips for Merchants" and as the title already says... it's about product data feeds.
My presentation slides are already available at my Slideshare.net net account. In order to hear what I have to say to those slides, you have to come to my session on Wednesday when every attendee will get the information that my slides are up on Slideshare.net. So if you are reading this before the coming Wednesday, you have already the advantage that you can check out the presentation before everybody else.
If you are a Merchant or Network and interested in the subject of affiliate data feeds, make sure that you also check out my data feed related resources at my website at Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds and my data feeds primer article at Cumbrowski.com/datafeeds101.
Cheers and see you soon in Cyberspace!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer and Blogger
http://www.cumbrowski.com/
1/17/2009
Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Las Vegas came to an end this Tuesday. I am always fascinated by the fact that I get something out of it, which I had no idea about when I entered the airplane in Fresno last weekend to go to the conference. Sure, I always like to get back in touch personally with the friends and business partners who I more often than I'd like to, neglected during the past months.
A large part of the year 2008 was again sucked away by some invisible force, which cannot be explained with any know law of physics. I just had the feeling that the year was by no means anything as close to 365 days in length. 120 days is probably much closer to the "felt" length of the previous year. No computer will change this feeling of mine. I know it were 365 days, but try to get this message to my intuition and my guts.
I stumbled across an interesting article by Jeff Molander, CEO of Molander and Associates, which was published in May 2008 at the UK marketing research company blog by eConsultancy (like a Brit version of MarketingSherpa / MarketingExperiments).
I didn't see this one when it was published it last year. As I mentioned already, it was written in May 2008. Now it's January 2009. I suggest that you are going to read Jeff's article, it is most certainly worth your time.
Where are we today? Did things change? ... I don't think that they did very much... a little bit, true, I have to be fair with that one.
The holistic approach should be taken beyond affiliate marketing and applied to all marketing activities that can be tracked somehow, online and offline (pay-per-call is getting more and more mature these days)
eBay Seems to be Leading the Pack once more
I attended this Tuesday at the summit a session by Steve Hartmann and William Martin-Gill from the auction giant eBay.com. The affiliate manager(s) from eBay were giving a presentation that I found pretty interesting. I did not follow the eBay program during the last year very much, I have to admit to my discredit, so what they were talking about was all news to me.
eBay does pay affiliates based on the value and quality of the business that they refer. This is not in beta, they doing this across the board today already.
This shift that eBay underwent after they moved their program away from Commission Junction and brought the whole program in-house was also causing a shift within their programs list of top 100 affiliate partners (they said that, not me). They were basically able to clean up the house. Sure, they lost some publishers over this, but why bother, those publishers were the ones that only sent low quality traffic along their way. The publishers who send great traffic on the other hand, saw their commission double and quadruple instead.
Affiliate Marketing in Europe being behind the U.S.? Look again!
I also touch-based with some European affiliate networks and German OPMs, specifically with Deputy Managing Director Torben Heimann from TradeDoubler Germany (which does not have a presence in the United States ... YET), Markus Kellermann Head of Affiliate Marketing and some of his colleagues from eXplido Web Marketing.
They actually implemented already tracking technology that is capable to provide analytics and commission structures attached to that data, which goes beyond the mere "last click" and "banner impression" of how U.S. Networks track stuff since the day when Amazon.com launched their partner program soon to be 15 years ago. They basically do some crude multiple-touch-point tracking of clicks and content views (e.g. video watches). Nothing as sophisticated as some of the top web analytics solution providers is capable of, but hey, it's going into the right direction.
Nothing new from our old, big and fat networks here in the States. It seems that they try to ignore the changes around them for the greater part, hoping that things will be as good (for them) as they always were. I get the feeling that some executives at those networks (I won't mention names) live in some state of denial of the realities of this industry.
Europe did not only catch up; they surpassed us already!
In 2003, Germany and the rest of Europe seemed to live in the affiliate marketing stone age. Over the years, this huge gap got smaller. After I learned at ASW about what they are already doing today, I'd say that there is no sign of this old gap anymore at all, quite the opposite... A gap is opening again, but this time the other way around.
U.S. based networks who continue to live in their bubble, will one day go down together with it, if they don't start getting their act together soon and do some catching up with the rest of the people on this planet.
What was in my opinion the most Disappointing Session at ASW 2009?
Believe it or not, I was actually able to manage seeing a bunch of the educational sessions at the Summit. The picks that I made were pretty diverse. The first session where I was able to make it to on Sunday was the session/panel about "Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing". It was moderated by Haiko de Poel Jr. from ABestWeb.com and included the panelists Brian Littleton, CEO of the affiliate network ShareASale, old-school super affiliate Connie Berg, founder and owner of the top-coupon web site FlamingoWorld.com, among other successful affiliate projects, OPM Chuck Hamrick from Affiliate Crew and last but not least a guy from a toolbar development company and subsidiary of Rakuten, who owns the LinkShare affiliate Network. (I am sorry, I cannot remember the guy's name. He jumped in last minute for Paul Nichols from eBates.com)
The session was a bit of a disappointment for me. I don't think that it was the fault of Haiko or any other panelist in the room that the session pretty much fell flat on its face and was over after 40 minutes already (20 minutes too short), because nobody had anything to comment, ask or say at the end.
I think that biggest problem was that right from the start more than just one major industry problem became the herd of elephants in the room. It was impossible to tackle all of them at the same time, because it takes much more than the time available for average comments and questions to even scratch the surface of just one of the issues that filled up the room like smog the L.A. city limits during rush hour in summer.
Maybe we should try one issue at a time the next time around. I don't know. It's tough and my suggestion to the approach of the subjects might falls as flat on its face as the approach last Sunday.
What was the IMO most Productive Session at ABW 2009?
I would say that is title has to go to the panel "Super Affiliate PPC Marketing Strategies" moderated by Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom and panelists Rosalind Gardner, author of the Super Affiliate Handbook and CEO of WebVista, Inc., Colin McDougall, author of the VEO Report and CEO or the VEO 2.0 Elite Certification Course and last but not least, super affiliate and fellow blogger Amit Mehta, CEO of Performance Marketing Worldwide and author of the blog Super Affiliate Mindset.
The panel was very well moderated and thought through by moderator Anik Singal (hey, it's the experience from teaching at Affiliate Classroom and PPC Classroom I guess). The panelists themselves were also top of the crop, long time affiliate marketing professional with hands on and real as reality gets experience in various different areas and niches of this industry.
It was demonstrating nicely to the audience that there is simply no silver bullet in this business. There are numerous different (and sometimes even conflicting) ways to be successful as an affiliate marketer.
Why I think that this session was the most productive? Very simple answer: All of the panelists were speaking honestly about everything they did right and where they screwed up. No panelist was holding back any secrets and answered any of the many asked questions as good as humanly possible. I don't think that anybody who was asking a question walked away without an answer or at least with a sack full of ideas and things to check, measure, verify or test.
After the session was officially over, all panelists remained where they were and did not leave until they responded to/answered the questions that people who approached them personally, were asking them. I stood next to a visitor who was getting a crash course in PPC campaign creation and initial testing by Amit. The tips were not vague at all... real figures and numbers were given. Tools mentioned by name and URL, even the personal unknown favorites, which might provide a cutting edge over competitors, while you know about them and they do not.
Very refreshing!
What was IMO the most Enjoyable Session at ABW 2009?
The session that was one hour long, but felt like 30 minutes or less, while getting a ton of specific tips and information, the none-specific, but bloody honest truth (test-test-test-test, don't guess or assume = work), mixed in with some humorous, interactive and engaging segments to get the crowds full attention while at the same time help the listeners to relax a bit to be able to suck in more facts about a somewhat dry and boring subject. Well, a subject that involves hands on the job work, and separates facts from fiction. What I am talking about? "Landing Page Testing to increase Conversion", presented all by its lonely self, Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTurner.com and author of the book "Landing Page Optimization", which I can also highly recommend buying by the way. I wrote a short review about it on Search Engine Journal when it came out.
Tim knows his stuff and is not kidding around. At the same time he knows how to present structure and perform a presentation that is never boring for even a second and where you walk away from with the feeling and knowledge, that you learned something new, that you did not know or even thought about before the session.
I did a video interview with Angel Djambazov, Marketing Manager at PopShops.com and Kellie Stevens from Affiliate Fairplay at Affiliate Summit West 2009 at the Rio all-suites hotel and casino, January 11-13, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 13, 2009. The interview is about ReveNews.com where Angel is Editor in Chief and about Kellie's commitment to write some posts for ReveNews.com, if Angel will send her some premium coffee from his home in Seattle, Washington. Kellie's posts are something that is worth looking forward to. Kellie did win Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Marketing Legend the day prior to this interview for some good reasons. Billy Kay also made a commitment I got told by Angel, but unfortunately I was unable to get this commitment on camera by Billy himself.
Here is the video interview. Also mentioned in the Video were Wayne Porter and Pat Grady.
Click here to view the embedded video.
More ReveNews.com Bloggers Wanted
Furthermore, Angel mentioned that despite the various new ReveNews.com bloggers he was able to get to write and contribute to this blog, especially experts in the social media space; RN still needs some expert voice and opinions to other relevant and important subjects, such as Net Neutrality and/or Internet Security. Those subject used to be covered well in the past, by another Affiliate Marketing Legend (the first one actually) and co-founder of this web site, Wayne Porter.
Unfortunately does Wayne not write as much (and long, longer than mine, seriously hehe) as he used to not too long ago. This is sad, but nothing Angel or I can do much about it, except for hunting down some experienced security experts with some writing skills to fill the huge void that the absence of Wayne created here.
Some Fun at the End to Loosen Up a Little Bit
I published a second video, which is only one minute in length about the Affiliate Summit Triathlon. It's actually a funny video. I hope you will enjoy it, but do not forget the serious issues that I was pointing out in this post over all this fun and excitement.
Affiliate Summit West 2009 Triathlon Best of - Crashes
Click here to view the embedded video.
Okay, that is enough now!
I can already see Shawn Collin's face, when he looks at this post of mine and thinking to himself "Gee, again one of Carsten's overly long blog posts that I am not able to read entirely, because my attention span doesn't exceed 500 words at one time". Sorry Shawn, but I hope that my paragraph headings will help that you are not missing too much of the facts and details of my post hehe.
Bonus: Full Video - Gary Vaynerchuk Keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2009
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Check out my free collection of useful internet and affiliate marketing resources at Cumbrowski.com. All the hard research work done for you already, that you don't have to. You're welcome!
1/10/2009
Okay, here is a quick one with a long quote of Jessica Luthi from AffiliateProgramAdvice.com before I am heading off for Las Vegas to Affiliate Summit 2009 West. The quote summarizes everything pretty nicely. I could not have it said better myself. I filled out the survey a couple minutes ago and suggest that other affiliate marketers will do the same.
Shawn Collin's AffStat reports provide interesting insights into the affiliate marketing space from an advertiser's perspective.
Peter Figueredo from NETexponent released last November their first AffiliateBenchmark research report, which already provided some interesting insights into the affiliate marketing space.
I was yelling two years ago in January 2007 "Where is the Affiliate Benchmark Guide 2006". Now I am hoping to get what I was asking for back then. The survey only takes a few minutes and you will get a free copy of the results, two more reasons why you should do it.
AffiliateProgramAdvice.com and E-Consultancy.com both companies are independent and impartial and trusted.
Last year e-consultancy.com (largest independent UK Data Research company) and in association with AffiliateProgramadvice.com made UK Affiliate Marketing History by producing the first ever UK Affiliate Census which can be downloaded here http://econsultancy.com/reports/uk-affiliate-census-report .
The UK Census came about due to the lack of transparency for Advertiser and Affiliate Networks in terms of who are "affiliates" Very little is known about the very people who contribute billions to our online economy. Affiliates/publishers also have little or no information about each other in terms of what is the average revenue an affiliate makes, what do affiliates see as a threat to the industry, what is the best method of promoting a merchant/Advertiser, how many networks does an affiliate belong to?.
This year it's now time to turn our attention to the USA too. This census will be a first for the USA so a bit of USA Affiliate Marketing history is in the making, all too exciting and for the UK we already have historical data so we can now plot changes/trends. We intend to do a US an UK comparison too, is the US any different to the UK? Does the UK do it better? (cheeky grin)
We believe this Affiliate Census will be the biggest piece of research in understanding "who are the affiliates and what do they do and how do they do it"? But... we can't do this without the entire industry getting behind this and pushing this out so here is what we need for you to do.
For Affiliates
The survey is for affiliates and takes less then ten minutes to complete by way of thanks to all those who complete the survey, we will send you the results, there is an option at the end for you to add your email address for when the report is published, this is optional. Please be aware this survey is 100% confidential, we do not ask for any personal information and the questions are fairly generic, by all means walk through it first.We have a US survey (aimed at US Affiliates) can be seen here http://bit.ly/VG5N
We have a UK survey (aimed at UK affiliates) can be seen here http://bit.ly/pNPQ
So if you are a US affiliate please follow the US link and if you are a UK affiliate please follow the UK link.
For affiliates who are neither UK or US, you can still participate, example if I live in Germany but promote UK Advertisers, you would follow the UK survey link.
Cut off is 27th January 2009
Thank you so much in advance and if I could be a little pushy, when you have completed the survey, pass this on to anyone you think would be interested. You rock!
For Agencies
Please grab any information from the above and just email anyone you think would be interested in this as you will want to see the published results too.For Affiliate Networks
You know you want to see the published results and if you email your entire network of affiliates by way of thanks, drop me your logo Jessica at affiliateprogramadvice.com and we will add this to the published report with a link to your network.For Merchants/Advertisers
We know you will want to see the results of this survey, so any direct partnerships you have in place with any one in the affiliate marketing industry, please point them to the survey.
See you in Vegas!
Carsten
1/5/2009
I was updating and expanding my affiliate product data feeds and APIs resources at Cumbrowski.com, in particular the resources to the product feeds and store builder feature provided by the PepperJam affiliate network, which was launched about one year ago.
I liked what I saw overall, although some items were, in my opinion a great idea, but then implemented half way only, probably without intending it.
Product data are available to any affiliate without any cost directly via the PepperJam Network web interface. There is also a coupon feed available, in delimited format and RSS format (using some custom tags outside the RSS definition). They also have a tool called "store builder" (product show-case creator), which is similar to the tools available through third party tools providers like PopShops.com, GoldenCan.com, DataFeedFile.com or FeedShare.com.
Providing the feeds directly via HTTP, accessible via any web browser is a smart, efficient and cost effective solution. There is no need to charge any fee for setup or maintenance, because there is really nothing to setup. Via a, what you could call, "special page" are the product data rendered into the web browser in simple delimited text format, without HTML tags or anything like that. This is close to the format how the networks developer gets the same information out of their product catalog database, without the need for the developer to write a fancy, functional and error free user interface to browse the products.
The product information can be pulled and rendered into the browser in real-time.
Since no FTP account needs to be created and no static product feed files created to be picked up by the affiliate via FTP client software, a whole new set of options become available and possible. No disk space is wasted on files that are not being picked up and no server CPU is spending a single cycle of processing power on it, until the affiliate publisher actually requests it.
True, there are some challenges, if you use HTTP as delivery method, if the amount of product s requested and downloaded is very large. However, 99% of all merchant product feeds do not fall into this category and even the merchants who have such large feeds (e.g. Buy.com, Overstock.com or Walmart.com) learned that it makes sense to break up their huge 1 million+ products big data feeds into smaller chunks, because it is never an easy undertaking to process over 1 million product records all at once, regardless if you download them via FTP or not.
Since HTTP requests can be handled and processed in real-time, the option to provide filters to reduce the amount of data returned, is now suddenly also (or should be) of the interest of the network.
It used to be an interest of the affiliates only (for the most part). I remember the time when I downloaded gigabytes of junk data every day, because there was only the choice between "everything" and "nothing". Well, nothing was really an option, so you had to deal with all the overhead that you did not need.
The real-time factor does allow the setup of virtually an unlimited number of filters. It is sad that affiliate networks who utilize HTTP for product data delivery are not making much use of this. A filter by product category, advertiser and keyword should only be the very least at the beginning.
When I was an affiliate manager in 2003 for a retailer who had the affiliate program with Commission Junction, the first thing I did was the creation of an affiliate intranet where publishers could create an account and pull product information and more. The intranet was initially created to solve the issues of not having contact information of any publisher (a CJ "feature") , avoiding the $750 setup fee for the product catalog at CJ itself and the up to $250 setup fee for each publisher in our program that did not qualify for the free access to product feeds through CJ.
The intranet required a second registration, which is tough. We had to offer an incentive to do this. That was when we came up with features that were impossible to provide via the traditional network and the way how they did (and to some degree still do) things. For example it was possible to pull the top XXX number of best-selling products for the whole site or specific categories only and also the time-frame of the sales, ranging from "this month" to "all-time". This enables the discovery of seasonal trends or sudden "hot" items that are new in the product catalog.
Those are only a few examples. Use your imagination and I am sure that the possible opportunities that come out as a consequence of it would be great, if at least some of the ideas will be implemented.
You might say that all this is what the new hot feature "web services" is supposed to be doing.
Yes and No. The border between web services and delimited feeds with several filter options provided via HTTP gets blurry, no doubt about that, but the technical details how similar they might appear are still different. The question whether to use a delimited feed or a web service (if available) still remains to be answered on a case-by-case basis. In some cases a combination of both does make sense.
As with web services, providing other data via HTTP beyond product and coupon data makes sense also, including reporting data or general program information about active or possible merchant/advertising partners.
One thing that PepperJam forgot over the nice and easy access to the product data via HTTP is the need for automated access to the data. HTTP is great and the link provided, updated based on my selections even better, but all this is of no use for many affiliates, if they have to be logged-in to the networks web interface in order to use the URL provided to them.
If I log-off and try the feed URL, no records are returned. Not good!
PepperJam were not the first nor last who made this mistake. I remember LinkConnector.com having the same problem. I contacted them a while ago, suggesting to them to remedy this short-coming. I need to check, if they actually did anything or not. I could not send them sample source code as I did with Kolimbo (MyAffiliateProgram), where I could tell that they are using Microsoft Active Server Pages, where I am familiar with.
The affiliate network AvantLink.com did it right from the start. I wrote about it, when they launched, what they called their "AvantLink API Module". Well, AvantLink had and has the reputation to be very knowledgeable about the subject of feeds and APIs.
You can have a look at their solution to see how they made it possible to provide access to the data in an automated fashion but at the same time doing it in a controlled manner without the option for anonymous access to the content.
If you do not want or like to see what another affiliate network is doing, fine, how about Google?
If you used the Google Calendar, you probably noticed the feature to pull your private events as a feed via an obscure URL provided by Google with the note that you must not give the URL to anybody, because it would give that person access to your feed as well. The protection is the obscure code in the URL that is virtually impossible to guess by anybody.
In the case that you think that the URL did leak out somehow, the option is available to render that URL invalid and generate a new unique and private URL for the same content.
I think you got the idea behind this.
Oh, by the way, the coupon feed provided by PepperJam Network does not require to be logged in to pull it. The lack of tags for start and end date of a promotion in the RSS version of the feed limits its possible uses, but I provided an example with source code for how to use it.
I also put the source code of a Visual Basic Script on my website that works around the problem of the need to be logged in to the web interface in order to pull the product feeds. I added a bunch of command line options to make it as flexible as possible for the use by affiliates to automate the pickup of product data from PepperJam.
Last but not least. Is it really that hard to provide some notes about the general structure of the delimited feed (column and row separators, first row having column names or not, escaping of content that contains column or row delimiter) and to each column in the file about its use, possible values and format, which columns are required and always must have appropriate data provided by the merchant (and verified by you, the network)? Since the output data are generated on the fly, how about letting the publisher choose the format himself? We did that at our affiliate intranet too. The feed format preferences were simply stored with the affiliates intranet account. Some folks prefer tab-delimited, others pipe and there are even folks who like to deal with the mess that a CSV feed can create, if created improperly. The Linux guys prefer a simple Line-Feed after each record, the Windows guys a carriage-return plus a line-feed and the Mac guys just a carriage-return. Let each have it the way they like it.
I did as in almost every case educated guesses again by looking at actual product feed data from various selected merchants. But why should I do the guessing, if you are in the know and just forgot to write it down and share with your publisher base? "Should" and "Seems Obvious" is not good enough here. Once you automated the download, import, processing and publishing of a feed, having guessed wrong becomes more than a minor inconvenience, especially if it would have been easily avoidable early on.
Cheers
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur
Cumbrowski.com, the resources portal for internet marketers. The content is free, no strings attached.
12/6/2008
Ian Rosenwach, product manager at LinkShare, announced here at ReveNews.com in October this year the launch of the new LinkShare web service called "LinkShare Targeted Merchandiser API" and the feature by LinkShare that is based on that new web service called "Easy Links".
This is only an addition to a set of different web services that are available to LinkShare publishers. The web service was silently launched months earlier already and this post was originally written, but not published in June, a few days before the soft launch of the service. I provided feedback back in June. I updated and expanded this post to incorporate changes and additions to the new features since I originally wrote it some five months ago.
This API is LinkShare's first step into the realm of contextual advertising. The web service returns 1-X products of a LinkShare Advertiser, based on the content of a web page that was either specified in the API call or the referring page /URL (default), if no link was provided.
This is not a full blown contextual advertising service like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Amazon Omakase Links or eBay AdContext. LinkShare does not render any ads for you. You or somebody else (hint) needs to do this for you. Maybe LinkShare will offer something like this in the future, but nothing is planned to my knowledge.
The implementation guide lines for this API for developers can be found here.
Let's take a look under the hood. I had already a bunch of questions after looking over the beta of their Implementation Guidelines. LinkShare did not get back to me yet regarding all the questions and comments that I had, so I decided to repeat them here in my post.
Using the vast number of products that are already available to LinkShare via their Merchandiser Service (Affiliate Product Data Feeds) is a good thing to do and something that I have been talking about with people for a long time already. Making access to the product information as easy as possible for non-technical folks should be high on the priority list of advertisers. Existing and potentially new affiliates often like to promote a particular product they like and recommend. Being able to pull a product ad with affiliate link to get a commission for referrals is not as easy as adding an iLike widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. It should be, but we are still a far cry away from this.
Access to the new API is cumbersome and not helping a lot with the mentioned goal to make it very easy to use. Advertisers decide for themselves if they want to make their products available through the API or not. The advertiser must be using the LinkShare Merchandiser Service already though. Merchandiser enabled advertisers are not automatically enabled for Easy Links. You can find a list of Easy Links supporting merchants at the LinkShare Help Center here.
The affiliate itself also has to be enabled for the API and as far as I understand does this also require to be already enabled for the Merchandiser Service. The Merchandiser is not free to get access to for many affiliates. You either have to pay a setup fee or must be a good performing affiliate within the LinkShare network for several months already. But even if the Advertiser has the API enabled and uses the Merchandiser and you are an affiliate of that merchant and have Merchandiser enabled for your account, does not give you automatically access to the API. The merchant has to manually approve every affiliate first. I don't know if advertisers can enable automatic approval or not, at least for affiliates who were already approved to receive the advertisers product data feed via FTP.
Once you are approved for the API itself and for the access to the advertiser's products via the API, you can start making API calls and use the new web services feature. Unfortunately, it is necessary to specify with the API call which advertiser's products should be used for the contextual matching. It does not work in the way that the more advertisers are enabled for the API for your account the more products will become available for the matching of your content. This is a huge drawback and something LinkShare will hopefully change soon.
The affiliate has to specify an advertiser's MID with the API call and then only 1-x of the products available for that single merchant will be returned. This means that the affiliate has to pre-qualify the content of every page where you want to make use of the API first. If the page is about listening to music and not about making music, you should specify the MID of Apple iTunes and not Musicnotes.com to get a good match for example. This determination is a large piece of the matching already. If you need the API make some work for you, then I guess that you have to use advertisers like Overstock.com, WalMart or Target.com who have a lot of different products.
I noted back in June in my feedback to LinkShare about the new web service, that the practical use for the API will be significantly limited because of the requirement to provide the MID of an advertiser for the contextual matching. Ads cannot be generated like an AdSense, YPN, Amazon's Omakase, eBay AdContext or Microsoft Content Ad.
The "MID" is not something that a publisher specifies today on a page and ad unit level. He cannot reuse existing meta-data (keywords meta-tags etc.) and has only very few (and always ugly) ways of doing it. If you cannot find or program yourself a work around, the only option you are left with to limit the content of your whole website or website section to make sure that it always matched the product catalog of a specific merchant and then hard code the MID in your site template. I strongly suggest to make the MID optional and do a contextual matching across all merchants that are enabled for the publisher.
The updated developers guide also did not provide an answer to what results you have to expect in certain instances. I hope that the following question will be answered by the LinkShare web services team soon.
If I specify that I want 10 products back as a result, but you cannot find 10 products that actually match the content, what do you do? Do you return less than the 10 (only the ones where you have some kind of match)? Or are you filling the missing slots with products that you pick based on other criteria? What happens if there are no matches at all? I didn't see an error message for that, which implies that you always return at least one product.
In addition to the access to the Easy Links feature via web services, for the tech-savvy affiliates, LinkShare also offers access to the Easy-Links feature via an easy to use web interface. If you know how to create and implement Google AdSense ads into your website, you won't have any issues with using the Easy Links widgets provided via the LinkShare web interface for publishers.
The ad units provided by LinkShare are pre-defined, and are available in the standard banner sizes: 300 x 250 (medium rectangle), 468 x 60 (full banner), 234 x 60 (half banner), 120 x 240 (vertical banner), 125 x 125 (square button), 728 x 90 (leader board), 160 x 600 (wide skyscraper) and 120 x 600 (skyscraper).
The units can be customized to some degree. You can specify the border color, text color and link color and if you want to show the product name and/or product price. You do not have control over the product image and whether or not you want to show it. It also comes with a "buy now" button image, which cannot be changed. Also the link at the end of each product with the anchor "at Merchant Name" is static and not customizable.
Also not customizable are the background color of the ad unit, the font face, the font styles (bold, italic, size) and an alternative style for links if they are hovered over by the visitor. The border around the ad unit cannot be suppressed, if you want to. You can only change the color to match your site's background as closely as possible, especially if the background is not simply one color, but an image or gradient etc.
However, it's a good start and most affiliates are probably able to live with the limitations. I also assume that the team at LinkShare will extend on the available options in the future.
The ads will not show the most relevant products right away. It may take up to 48 hours until LinkShare determined the most relevant products for your particular pages. LinkShare will show products that match the site category that you selected during registration for your web site until LinkShare completed the contextual matching process.
The code to add to your affiliate pages looks like this.
<script type="text/javascript">lsadunit_publisherId = 'YOURPUBLISHERID';lsadunit_oid = '102327';lsadunit_width = 160;lsadunit_height = 600;lsadunit_uid = '2004804';lsadunit_u1 = '';</script><script src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js" mce_src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
You can get additional help and information to this feature at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers here.
LinkShare also seems to be pretty confident that they are able to do a perfect job when it comes to the matching of products to the publisher's page content. Even Google who has a much bigger pool of ads to chose from and several years for improving their matching algorithms (which still fails to produce good results in many cases), provides some means for the publisher to help them with the matching.
I am almost certain that LinkShare's matching is by far not as good as Google's nor do they have remotely enough ads to pick from for the matching, which makes it not always easier to find an ad that is actually relevant and targeted.
I suggested to LinkShare that the publisher will be provided with some overwrite options, e.g. a set of keywords that should be used. At the very least as a failover, if LinkShare's content matching returns too few results or no results at all.
In addition to that they could use the proprietary HTML tags by Google or by Yahoo! for the specification, which (content) segments of a HTML document should be included for the content matching (the Google tag) and/or which segments should be excluded from the matching (the Yahoo! tag).
I am pleased to see that a few of my suggestions and comments that I made to LinkShare directly were actually listed to and changed, such as the inclusion of the Error Numbers in the developer guide.
Overall I have to say that I think that it was a move into the right direction by LinkShare, but that I am not impressed by the implementation of the API as it is now. Some might argue that you are better of using the existing Merchandiser Query Tool API, which is not very far-fetched, but they just started.
The least I want to do is discourage the folks over at LinkShare and stop with what they are doing right now. Consider this assessment as a well intentioned feedback. Let's keep the stuff coming!
To learn more about the LinkShare web services and data feeds as well as web services and data feeds provided by other affiliate networks, check out the collection of resources and guides over here.
* Note to LinkShare Merchandiser Access
Request for access to Merchandiser Feeds - Online Form at LinkShare.com
Quote from their website:
- You have been active in the Network for at least 3 months, AND
- You have generated at least 50 orders in the most recent calendar month
LinkShare reserves the right to charge a one-time maintenance fee of $250 or discontinue access to the Merchandiser product.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
12/6/2008
I am not participating in discussions like this one at ABestWeb.com, even if I am contacted directly with the request to comment.
The debate whether or not publisher A is legitimate or not, if his business model is based on incentivized traffic, is irrelevant in my opinion. If the publisher uses desktop software or browser plug-ins does also not matter to me, regardless if that publisher honors the "affsrc=1" URL parameter or not.
I stated repeatedly in comments and blog posts of mine that I do not consider publishers who are using any type of incentive to drive business to an advertiser to be an affiliate. This includes coupon sites.
Those publishers are using the affiliate tracking technology for their purposes, because the existing technology does everything they need to run their business. That the technology works does not mean that the business model fits too.
It is not what advertisers are being sold about affiliate marketing and what it can do for them. Most advertisers launch their affiliate program with goals in mind like customer acquisition, pre-sale and moving potential customers a step forward in the buying process, extension of reach and branding.
Incentivized traffic on the other hand fits more the purpose of customer retention and increase of customer loyalty overall. This is a perfectly valid and good purpose, but it is not what advertisers have in mind when it comes to the marketing channel "affiliate marketing". This difference in types of traffic and referred business is often ignored or not understood. Advertisers allow incentive publishers and coupon sites into their program and eventually find out that a lot of their existing traffic is diverted as a result of it. Then they talk about how affiliate marketing does not work and that it cannibalizes their other marketing efforts and eventually shut the whole program down, because it "failed" to deliver what was promised.
The incentive traffic has to be viewed like a membership rewards program that many retailers already have in place. That traffic would be an extension of this type of promotional vehicle. As the in-house membership program is tracked and measured independently from the affiliate program, so should the incentivized traffic.
Affiliates are being paid commission on top of any rewards of any membership system that the retailers might have in place. The cost of an in-house membership and rewards program does usually have its own budget and its effectiveness is reviewed independently and not as part of the affiliate program, search marketing campaigns and display advertising activities. Maybe email marketing is included sometimes, especially if special mailers are sent to existing customers promoting the membership program.
Incentive publishers, like cash back shopping portals such as eBates.com and FatWallet.com, charity sites like and uPromise.comSchoolPop.com, as well as coupon sites should be tracked and reviewed outside of the regular affiliate program. The same platform might be used, but it must be ensured that tracking of those traffic sources does not interfere with the tracking of the core affiliate program.
The effectiveness of those methods have to be reviewed independently and decisions about whether to continue a partnership with a publisher or not also needs to be done separately. You cannot do that if you are using one tracking system for both of them. You are also not tracking your PPC or Email marketing campaigns via affiliate tracking links for the same reasons, right?
Not separating the two channels blurs the numbers and makes it impossible to gauge the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of each of them, resulting in decisions that are made based on wrong assumptions and misinterpretation of existing data.
The two channels overlap a little bit, as virtually all other marketing and advertising channels do today. If you do advanced web analytics already, and even consider multiple touch-points with a customer in the entire conversion path, then you probably already separate the different types of traffic by the different types of affiliates, even if you use the same tracking platform for both of them. The separation of the two would end the debate about parasites and how they steal commissions of regular affiliates - because you track them independent from each other.
You then can make much more educated decisions about the value of individual incentive publishers and the cannibalization of your other channels, including your affiliate program, your search marketing campaigns, your email newsletters to existing customers, your social media and viral marketing activities and your display advertising campaigns.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur
Internet Marketing Resources Portal at Cumbrowski.com
11/18/2008
The value of brands diminishes during times of recession. People tend to be more focused and interested in value, properties, features and benefits of a product, meaning that buying decisions are more driven by logic than impulse or feeling.
Branding in B-to-C means often to spend money on feel-good images and aspirations, rather than on highlighting actual benefits and useful properties of a product at least since the 1920s when Edward Bernays invented Public Relations.
This type of "branding" is usually not done in the B-to-B segment, because feel-good images tend not to solve actual business problems and fulfill business needs.
Customer service, sales support, technical support, supply chain compliance, distribution are the things that are focused on, the things that B-to-B customers actually care about. Nothing of that is called branding, but the matter of fact is that it is. If people say about your company that it has great technical support instead of they made good experiences with your tech support when they had issue X, then it is branding. Your name is associated with a good property that is important to your customers. This increases the likelihood to finalize a deal. If an important aspect for a B-to-B transaction is not brought up by a potential customer, it is a good sign that your brand or reputation answered this question for the customer already.
As a consumer brand can suffer because of association with something bad, a business brand can suffer as badly or worse, if it loses the association with a good characteristic or gets associated with a bad one. That's why should it be also important to a B-to-B Brand to protect itself. If you have a brand in the business sector and consumer sector as well, damage to the brand in one of the sectors can damage your brand in the other sector as well. Here is a good example:
I hate to drag out my own issues out to this blog, but sometimes your own negative experiences are better examples than something that was made up.
Real life issues also tend to be more accessible and easier to relate to by readers than anything that is pure hypothetical, which looms somewhat cloudy in the back of your head as a possibility in an "If then" scenario and therefore hard to get a grip on. It also feels somewhat alien and mysterious.
Often is there no practical advice to extract from it, because it is hard to give advice on something that you have never done or experienced yourself. Okay, here is the example that is based on my own experiences:
Gateway Computers is a consumer brand and used to be a business brand as well. They sold computers to individuals and corporations until 2007 when they sold off their business segment to a company called MPC Corp (which I had never heard of before).
I bought in 2006 a tablet PC from the Gateway business unit via their web site Gateway.com. With that computer I purchased a 4 year warranty, which included second business day on-site support, parts and labor cost covered. I just got a case now, which was the reason for me to get the expensive warranty in the first place. I bought the computer and warranty directly from the brand and manufacturer Gateway, because I felt sure that I will be covered in the case that I need it. I was obviously mistaken.
On the Gateway.com website is a news article published about the sale of their business unit to MPC and a FAQ for Gateway clients about what that means for them. There it states:
"Q) What can I as a Gateway pro customer expect of MPC?
A) It was important to Gateway that we find a good home for our valued professional customers. Like Gateway, MPC takes pride in a history of excellence, as it has routinely won industry awards and accolades for the quality of its products and services. The collaboration between Gateway and MPC over the first year will further assure that the transition is smooth for Gateway's pro customers. And, because Gateway's pro sales and service people are moving over to MPC as part of the merger, you can expect virtually all your company contacts to remain the same."
They obviously made a mistake, because it was not finding a good home at all. The company they sold their unit and brand name to filed for Chapter 11 just 1 year and 1 month after the acquisition, which is about one week ago from now.
It took me over one hour to get anybody from customer support on the phone. I was troubleshooting the issue myself already and knew exactly the part that was faulty and was also able to exclude a software issue as the cause. All I needed was a spare part and a technician to replace the part for me.
The person who I finally got on the phone could not help me at all and seems to me just a person whose job it is to pick-up the phone at all, because nobody else who could help me was left. I got an email to contact, what I did, where I didn't receive an answer since I sent my email last week on Friday.
The computer is still a Gateway and has the Gateway logo all over it. So I decided to contact Gateway, who was the manufacturer after all. They also make PCs today. I also got the warranty from them and not some third party.
The automated system sent me to a pre-recorded message telling me what I already knew, with the difference that I knew already more than that system, for example the fact that I won't get support by dialing the proposed phone number.
I played stupid and did not provide any IDs to be able to get through to a person. That person was not much of help of course, because the first level of customer support is not authorized to do any decisions of their own. The supervisor was not much of help either, but that's not the supervisor's fault, since he does not understand the dynamics of branding, customer satisfaction and their impact on sales and the company's overall business success. I was diverted to the Gateway support site, where I am currently attempting to break through the initial line of defense to get to somebody with a better understanding of the underlying issue of this case.
I also wrote a snail mail letter to corporate headquarters and management here in California where I tried to illustrate the problem that they, company/brand Gateway now have on their hand since they seem to have sold it to the wrong company who is not only having problems itself, but causing active damage to the Gateway brand as well.
If Gateway cares about its own brand image at all, they should step in and actively protect it by delivering what they promised themselves to former customers of them. I don't care about MPC and consider it a Gateway problem that Gateway can only solve in two different ways.
Option one would be to provide the support that they promised and restore their brand image that they are providing excellent support and service for their hardware.
Option two would be to go out of business themselves or stop making computers and make something else instead, like dishwashers or toasters or something like that.
Any other option would be killing their brand, at least for me and maybe the people who encountered the same issues like I did, plus probably a number of people who just heard about those cases and now also don't trust the Gateway brand anymore. Gateway still sells PCs to consumers, but there is no technical difference between my tablet-PC purchased via Gateway business than to the one that was sold via Gateway for consumers.
Does Gateway expect me to trust the consumer brand Gateway after this or making any recommendations to get a computer from them to friends, family members or any other person I know and talk about where to buy a computer and which make?
Unfortunately is it not that easy for notebook computers to simply go and buy a spare part yourself elsewhere and replace the faulty one yourself or with help of a friend or independent technician. The part is not much more expensive though and should not matter to you, if you have it flying around anyway, as they do in the case of Gateway. If it would be a desktop PC, I'd go to Best Buy, which is 2 blocks from here and buy a new card for $100 bucks and the problem would be solved.
Then I could spend all the time needed in the world to discuss the reimbursement of my cost, which should have been covered by the warranty. I don't have this option and the damage to my business is getting much higher than the cost for the part needed and labor to install it.
That was the reason for me to get the warranty and to choose a trusted brand like Gateway. They are now proving that this trust was ill founded.
In a time where product and service properties and especially qualities and flaws of them become more relevant even in the consumer market, companies should be twice as careful to avoid any damage to their name, or brand values. Values that were created via the hard work of their staff in the real world and not by selling feel-good images. Those values are becoming invaluable in times of recession, because only if those values still exist, does your business have a cutting edge over the competition, when nothing else separates you from them, including the price.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger
Cumbrowski.com Internet Marketing Resources
A quick update on November 24, 2008.
Over one week has passed now. Despite the second business day on-site support agreement, my computer is still not fixed.
I found out that it has the most problems if it uses the 3D acceleration via Direct 3D, so I pretty much disabled it for now, which has impact on some of what I am doing, but I was able to move those kind of tasks to one of my other PCs that I have here. That bought me time to deal with the issue.
Gateway sucks!
I turned around and asked their support, who was constantly pointing me to MPC, who is currently unable to help me, if it would be possible to proceed with paid support to get the thing fixed and then worry about the "who pays what" part later with MPC.
Notebook repairs are always tricky. You cannot just walk into the next computer hardware store and buy a spare part. I don't know where to get the broken part from and also I do not know how to replace it. Memory, HD, CD/DVD etc. would have been a different story. They didn't even want to help me then, even when I offered them to take my credit card information to make sure that this is covered and not ...blah ...blah. Can you believe that? It's the freakin' manufacturer himself and not some clueless third party.
They still did not help me and pointed to MPC. Then to some hardware websites, who sell Gateway notebook parts, but the part I need wasn't even listed. The stuff that came closest was out of stock.
I also don't know the exact part name/number/specs to do a search by that part number. I asked for this information, but they pointed me to some support documents that list multiple possible parts for my notebook model. None of them had the specific properties that mine has. I upgraded the GFX card to a 256 MB Name ATI Mobility Radeon X1400, the largest possible. Standard is usually 64 MB and all spare parts that I found were either the 64 MB and in a few cases a 128 MB version.
I will try calling MPC again this week and see, if I can make any progress there.
That was the last time in my life that I bought a Gateway computer, for business or for home.
This is what you can expect from Gateway nowadays. Not much of a difference to a shabby and unknown "import/export" shop in Hong Kong, operated out of a garage by some dude, except for the part that involves the stealing of money in addition to screwing you with wrong/overpriced cheap hardware parts that fall apart when you start to really use them.
Gateway obviously does not care about its brand anymore and is willing to flush it down the drain. I don't know if that is such a smart decision during times of recession. A few repairs of notebooks, even if they don't have to "legally" would have gone a long, long way. Being cheap and not even helpful, if being offered to get paid for the help is money saved (and/or ignored) on the wrong end. That savings will be offset by damages that by far exceed them.
10/30/2008
10/23/2008
This post is a book review of MarketingSherpa's "B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook" 2008-2009 Edition.
Introduction and Disclaimer
I have been thinking about writing this post for some time now. It happens rarely that I feel the urge to pitch a product and push people to buy it where I am absolutely convinced that they will be glad that they did and don't care about getting an incentive or commission for doing it. But there is the risk that people who read it at a site like ReveNews.com would claim that I only wrote it to push a product for my own benefits; a dilemma that is tough to solve and the reason why I was holding back for so long.
I have now decided to ignore the risk and pitch the product anyway. I will also disclose in more detail my involvement with the creator of the product and leave it up to the reader to decide, if my recommendation is genuine or just a cheap self promotional pitch for my own benefits.
The MarketingSherpa B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook 2008-09
The guide arrived in a big and heavy box and I thought what on earth this could be. It was the draft version of the MarketingSherpa B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook 2008-09 then still called the B-to-B Marketing Handbook 2008-09.
The handbook is over 500 pages thick and the biggest book that I have ever seen released by the Sherpa to this day. Most of their other guides, benchmarks or handbooks are 200-300 pages and dwarfed by this one.
The book is packed through the roof with data charts, eye-tracking heat-maps, written and visual real world example creative's, statistics, tips, general how-to's and best practices. It has basically everything that you need to do be a more successful marketer who promotes business to business products and services. This is not an exaggeration by any means. If you are an Affiliate Manager responsible for recruiting affiliates or a network that needs to recruit advertisers and performing affiliates alike, then B2B marketing is what you already do or should do, if you haven't done so before.
It is a Manual and not just a Handbook
The word "Handbook" in the title of this book can be taken literally, although "Manual" would have been a bit more accurate. This is what this book should be in your marketing department.
It should be the manual for newly hired staff to learn the do's and don'ts and the how-to and the reference to look up information to specific subject for the experienced marketers and veterans.
It's a fountain of information, tips and tricks and stats for B2B marketers, covering every possible aspect, beyond just online. One of the other great parts of the book are the practical tips to get Marketing and Sales work in conjunction with each other, which is in reality hard to do at best. Often are marketing and sales not aligned very well and see each other as a necessary evil that only tries to take away time to do your work properly. It also provides a dictionary to make sure that marketers and sales guys speak the same language when it counts to avoid misunderstandings.
Free Glimpse at the Book
Listing the 14 pages long Table of Contents would be a bit too much, but it does give you a better understanding about what subjects the book covers. The full Table of Contents is included in the free PDF download of the 22 pages 
Executive Summary . That is nice and very helpful.
The remaining pages include examples and highlights of the book. This will allow you to have a glimpse at the content and its quality for yourself to make up your own mind, if this book is something for you or not. The free excerpt can be downloaded here .
Cost-Benefit Consideration
The handbook is not cheap and probably not affordable for small affiliate programs or B2B marketing departments that are management part time only. If you have one or more people on staff that does marketing full-time, the investment into this book will pay for itself quickly.
The regular price is $697 and here is the direct link to it. I just found out myself, that the $200 off promotion is exclusive to some partners of MarketingSherpa. I should have read the emails from their AM a bit more carefully I guess. Since $200 is a sizable chunk of savings, it would be irresponsible of me, not mentioning it to you. You can find an affiliate link to get this discount on my website. I will get commission on it though, just FYI.
Disclosure
I received a draft copy of the B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook then still called the B-to-B Marketing Handbook free to review to let the Sherpa know what I think about it. I received a few benchmark guides free over the past 2 years or so, but bought several benchmark guides and buyers guides myself years earlier already (I spent way more than $1,000 on their products out of my own pockets).
When Cumbrowski.com started growing from a Family website to an industry resource in 2006, MarketingSherpa rejected me as an affiliate at first. I responded to the email that notified me about the rejection that I will link to their stuff anyway, affiliate or not, because I believe that their products are great and highly relevant for the people who are interested in my collections of resources on my website. It would only be fair to pay me a small commission, for the few occasional referrals from my site and that I will be a low maintenance affiliate hehe.
They responded and decided to let me become an affiliate for them anyway and this relationship continued after MarketingSherpa was acquired by Marketing Experiments in November 2006. I refer new customers to them constantly, not high volume, but it is B2B and a niche within B2B, so what is volume there anyway?
I also know that many referrals where I played a part in it are not being tracked and no commission is being paid for them. Getting a free version (often draft) of a benchmark guide or buyers guide could be seen as a compensation of that not-tracked referrals, but I also believe that the Sherpa appreciates my comments and feedback that I am willing to provide to help them improve on their products.
I am still a paying member, which cost several hundred dollars per year to get access to their vast repository of articles, how-to's, case studies, survey data and statistics.
There you have it. That's my relationship with MarketingSherpa. I can true and honestly recommend any of their great products to anybody in marketing and suggest to anybody who does not about them yet but considers himself a professional marketer to check them out. I have not been to any of the several industry events that are organized by the Sherpa to provide you with first hand information and opinion about them, but I am sure that those highly specialized and targeted events are worthwhile for any professional marketer who is specialized in the segment that is subject of the event. I cannot believe that somebody who produces such quality resource products and guides would produce educational real life events that suck hehe.
This post does not include any affiliate or tracking link.
Other Highly Recommended Sherpa Publications
Although I personally think that all of the Sherpa's publications are great and of high value for anybody who is involved in any of the aspects of marketing covered by them, there are a few books that stick out and are of exceptional value and worth mentioning specifically.
For more great content and publications, such as the Search Marketing, Email Marketing or e-Commerce Benchmark Guides, visit the Sherpa store.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Entrepreneur, Blogger and Internet Marketer
For more resources and information to various subjects of internet marketing, visit Cumbrowski.com. The information are free, no membership or sign-up is required.
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10/18/2008
10/5/2008
The discussion at Brad Waller's post "Reason #4837 Why This Industry Needs an Association" from Friday about the Hydra Network/Vista Print incident and publication of the incident at MediaPost.com sparked two separate discussions that were not exactly related to the subject of the post.
I want to talk about one of them and maybe about the second one in a separate video post.
Jonathan (Trust) suggested pulling the Hydra Network ads on ReveNews.com, although Hydra Network responded and indicated that they don't want to pull their advertisements, even though the post about them was not exactly talking in their favor.
Angel Djambazov pointed out the
"separation between editorial and advertising"
and cited the "Editors Code of Preferred Editorial Practices" (PDF version) by the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) stating:
"... Let the advertiser know that negative content will be written about them and allow them the opportunity to remove their ad."
and
"This allows editorial and advertising elements to be balanced while eliminating reactionary mob mentality."
Kelly Stevens also pointed out that
"it's an ad not an endorsement. As marketers, we all should recognize that."
and that
"normal economic principles need to dictate. ...... business decision of bringing targeted advertisers to the readers."
If
"... there is no response to the ad. It becomes an unproductive campaign for them. ...... Advertisers who fit with the demographics of the ReveNews.com viewership have successful campaigns."
She also said that in case of her own website, AffiliateFairPlay.com, companies approached her to advertise on it, who she exposed as being unethical and that those advertisers obviously didn't do their homework well and checked in more detail, what Kelly's website is all about. She rejected such advertisers because
"it would undermine what my business is. So that trumps the ethics considerations."
I agree completely with Kelly and Angel. I spend some time thinking about this dilemma myself.
Since I consider the advertisement on my own site Cumbrowski.com editorial content, except for the ads where I do not have editorial control over, such as Google AdSense, I call them Sponsorship instead of Advertisement and associate my name/brand with the advertisers brand (and vice versa). I made this clear in the editorial note on my website, which can be accessed from virtually any page on my site.
But this is because the site uses my name, which is my brand. Cumbrowski.com is not business publication with a brand name that is not associated with a person and a publication that tries to be fair and balanced overall, even if the individual bloggers express their own personal views. For this reason ReveNews.com tries to get as much different types of bloggers as possible, to be able to represent the different views and opinions of people in the affiliate marketing industry.
ReveNews.com did the right thing in case of Hydra Network and provided the ability for Hydra Network to make an official statement, provide comments and/or publishes a separate post, even with comments off, if insisted, which wasn't the case with Hydra Network, but in another case that involved a post of mine here at ReveNews.com.
I think that a publication like ReveNews.com should separate advertisement on its website from the editorial content and should put a border between them, that advertisement will not influence content and vice versa, because it would take away the means for an advertiser to respond to the allegations and do damage control, send a message that changes were made, if the allegations were just, clarify facts, fight misconceptions or correct false information that were stated like facts.
All this could be done via an ad campaign that is visible beyond the one post about them, because some people might hear about this, but did not read the posts themselves. They might develop an opinion that is less favorable for the advertiser and maybe that is something the affected advertiser would like to correct or change. If ReveNews.com would refuse ads from that Advertiser, he wouldn't be able to do that.
My video rambles in more detail about this. It is about 8 minutes long.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Here is the backup link to the video at YouTube.
You can also download the video in higher resolution and AVI format at MediaFire.com.
Back to the original question, when you should drop an advertiser? ... If it makes business sense to do so. If an advertisement causes more damage for your business and/or brand than you gain from it, because of loss of readership and/or damage to the reputation of your brand, then it would be the right choice to pull an advertisement. I dare to speculate that most publications don't get into the position very often where they have to consider this question seriously, because the advertiser himself tends to answer this question much quicker and clearly before it comes to that.
Cheers
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur
Cumbrowski.com is a resources portal for internet marketers. The content is free, no strings attached.
10/1/2008
I wrote a post after Affiliate Summit West 2008 with information and links to the numerous educational session videos, audio and slides for the past affiliate summit.
The videos for Affiliate Summit East 2008 in Boston are out, so I thought that an update from my part is kind of required hehe.
Affiliate Summit East 2008
August 10-12, 2008 at the Boston Seaport Hotel in Boston - Agenda
All slideshows, including the ones from previous events can be watched online here at SlideShare.net.
Access to all videos (free, only sign-up for Affiliate Summit Newsletter is required to receive the user name and password for access to the videos).
Bonus
Affiliate Summit West 2009
Date: January 11-13, 2009 at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada
Gary Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv will be the keynote speaker for Affiliate Summit 2009 West.
Teresa Caldwell volunteered again to do the Mentor Program at Affiliate Summit West 2009.
I did participate in the program for the previous Affiliate Summit as a mentor and will offer my help for the next summit as well. The mentor program for Affiliate Summit 2008 East in Boston also triggered a blog post of mine with tips for first-time conference attendees.
Additional Affiliate Summit Content and Resources
And last but not least a post of mine that I wrote at Affiliate Summit West in February that discusses the question that I hear from people who think about attending a conference, but never did, all the time: "What is the Value of Attending Real Life Conferences?". I hope that my rather long post will clarify that a bit and will convince the one or the other to get beyond the "thinking about" step this time.
For additional events in the internet marketing space check out my Internet Marketing Events Calendar.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
9/26/2008
8/14/2008
7/18/2008
5/23/2008
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