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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
6/22/2008
You think that somebody learns from past mistakes and does not repeat the same mistake over and over again. That does not seem to be true in the case of Google, specifically with their YouTube.com property.
After my very negative experience in January this year did one thing change to the better as a direct or indirect consequence of it. There is now a help page at the YouTube web page and a designated email address for related issues.
However, the general issue when it comes to responses in a timely fashion to time critical and multiple inquiry attempts remains the same. The help page regarding the previous issue is nice and good, but it is only the equivalent of fighting the symptoms of a viral disease instead of the cause of the disease itself, the virus.
While the consequences of my previous issue were very bad, the consequences of the current one are horrific in comparison, because of much more far reaching consequences.
I try to get a hold of somebody at YouTube for two weeks now, which is a long time by any reasonable standard. I contacted YouTube again today, the second time in writing instead of plain and simple email or contact form. I sent another fax, as I did two weeks ago, in addition to an email, due to the significance of the problem.
I will not only repeat what I sent to YouTube, but publish the exact copy of the fax that I sent to them instead. (more...)
6/11/2008
Subtitle: About Data Feeds, Web Services and the use of Interfaces (APIs) in Affiliate Marketing.
Slow progress is made when it comes to the utilization of data feeds and web services by affiliate networks and also by advertisers. The biggest progress is currently made when it comes to web services, which is a good thing.
The use for data feeds and web services by affiliate publishers might be similar to some degree, but there are distinct cases where they differ significantly. Web services cannot replace data feeds entirely, but they can and should replace some of the uses of data feeds today, where web services do a much better job and where data feeds were a poor (but in the past the only) choice to begin with.
Third party providers who aggregate and normalize data feeds will also not be replaced by web services and cannot be replaced by offerings from the individual networks either.
Each and everything has its own distinct role and purpose, its core strengths and its own weaknesses. The goal should not be to replace one or the other, but to leverage and support the strengths and reduce or eliminate the weaknesses.
Advertisers, networks, 3rd party feeds and widget providers and affiliate publishers all need to play their part and the right use and availability of data feeds and web services as interface between the four parties will ensure that everybody gets the most out of it and be winning at the end.
Theory
In theory is only the connection between advertisers and affiliate publishers relevant and networks and 3rd party providers are "only" a middleman that should be eliminated. However this is not the case in reality. Those middle men are needed and have to play a distinct role in many scenarios where a one-on-one communication between advertiser and publisher is impractical or impossible. The only option in those cases would be that the publisher develops himself the interface that is already provided by the networks and 3rd party providers. This is of course possible, but in many cases a waste of resources on the publishers side and a distraction from the publishers own core competencies.
Reality
If you want to use a computer, you don't have to buy an operating system or software for it. You could write those things yourself and would keep the software companies out of the loop. Except for a few very specific applications is this scenario completely unrealistic and may sound like a funny joke to some. However, this is exactly what we are talking about, if you are talking about the elimination of the network or 3rd party middleman.
I created some diagrams to show the flow of data (information) from a merchant and advertiser to the affiliate publisher. I included more than just product data, because those are not the only information that an affiliate needs to get from an advertiser in order to make this all work. Some of the other information are often overlooked unfortunately, although they are at least as equally important as the product data and should be made accessible via feeds and/or web services too.
1. One publisher/affiliate has one relationship to a single advertiser/merchant only.
2. One publisher has multiple relationships with different advertisers and merchants that each provides product data, URLs, creative's directly to the affiliate in the same or different formats and methods.
3. A network aggregates all the data from multiple advertisers and provides the data in one format and one method to the individual publisher.
4. The publisher has relationships with multiple advertisers via multiple networks. The networks aggregate for him the data from the group of merchants each network has a relationship with. The publisher has now the problem again that the different networks provide the data in different formats and via different methods to him.
5. 3rd party service and tool providers aggregate the data across multiple networks and/or multiple advertisers and provides them in one normalized format to the publisher via only delivery method.
Here is a link to download the full Diagram
The Roles
What you can see from the diagrams is the fact that networks and 3rd party vendors are playing the role of aggregators and data cleansers who provide data from multiple sources and possibly different format and delivery method to the receiver (the publisher or the 3rd party provider) in one normalized format.
Networks aggregate and normalize the data of multiple advertisers and 3rd party providers do the same but a level higher, across multiple networks.
The goal and result at the end is a one-on-one relationship with a publisher to make it as simple as possible to use the data to promote the advertisers products and services. That is what the affiliate's core competence should be; reality is that affiliates are spending way too much time and energy on the aggregation and normalization of data from various different sources, in different formats and delivery methods.
Poor Job Done
The affiliate networks did in the past a very poor job when it came to the aggregation and delivery of normalized data to publishers who needed it. There are no standards, little or no documentation and limited to no access to the data by automated means at all. Even the networks own definitions and specifications were and are often too vague and sometimes even violated by themselves, due to the lack of validation of the data that the network received from the advertiser, often due to the lack or too vague specifications of the feed structure and delivery methods.
The use of standards in web services technology, like SOAP or REST help to reduce this kind of issues at least for the web service option that is still in its infancy and evolving.
The 3rd party aggregators took over and dealt (and still deal) with all that kind of issues for the publishers and provide data to affiliates in clear format or for direct use via widgets and gadgets.
Since networks are in many cases the one-on-one connection point for some affiliates, tools and services that are usually provided by the 3rd party services are and should be provided by the networks directly to the publishers.
Perfect World Scenario
In a perfect world (which should be everybody's goal that you want to reach eventually, without never getting there, even if you think that you almost made it) things would be like this.
To make it easy for merchants (who provide the original data) and for 3rd party aggregators to get data through the network efficiently, standards should be defined and used by all players to avoid vague and incomplete proprietary structures, formats and methods, or simply said: Stop reinventing the wheel over and over again (and that more or less poorly to top it all of)!
This is another good reason for having an industry association (which we do not have today); the discussion, specification, agreement and documentation of standards like that.
3rd party vendors should concentrate on the means of delivery to the publisher and provide the highest flexibility and number of delivery methods as possible. Listen to affiliates suggestions and requests and then implement those.
Affiliate network could partner with 3rd party vendors to make the same tools and delivery options available to the publishers directly for the kind of publishers who decide to only work with one particular network directly. This would allow networks to concentrate on their core competencies, like the aggregation and normalization of advertiser data, affiliate tracking and fraud detection and supplemental services like commission payments to the affiliates on behalf of the advertiser and/or affiliate management and recruiting services.
Make access to the data available without the need to jump through several hoops. Show what you have and provide documentation and clear instructions, without the need for asking for this information. Agree on standards wherever possible to make everybody's day easier and to free up time that you could spent on improving your core competencies.
Conclusion
All this is in no conflict with the ideas of a free market and strong completion. The global market is not localized and proprietary and so you shouldn't be either.
I have a lot of ideas for tools and widgets that would be of great help for publishers and even help to expand your current perspective of who a publisher could be today. The problem is that those ideas (where I am probably not the only one who thinks of the same) all require that the data and information flow is efficient and streamlined that we need to spend less time on reoccurring/repetitive problems and implementing workarounds for shortcomings that shouldn't exist and more time on implementing those ideas and have publisher do what their core competency is, being innovative in the ways they promote the advertisers products and services and reach into markets where the advertiser cannot or does not want to go or not even know that it existed at all.
To the Future!
For resources and information about the mess we are having today, see my affiliate data feeds and web services resources at Cumbrowski.com. They help, but do not solve the core problems that we have.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski @ Cumbrowski.com
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur
6/8/2008
My post with my book reviews in April this year was so well received that I decided to continue with this and write another review. 
I do not plan to limit myself to reviews of pure SEO and SEM/PPC related books and will cover books that are related to online marketing in a broader sense. The latest book that I got is about blogging. SEO elements are included in the book, which is not surprising, because SEO should be part of every online publishing project or campaign nowadays. You would not have done your homework well, if you would exclude it or only give it an after-thought.
I received last week my pre-ordered copy of the book "ProBlogger \u2013 Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income" from Amazon.com. The book was written by two well known bloggers of the industry, Darren Rowse from Problogger.net and Chris Garrett, a freelance blogger and consultant. (more...)
6/4/2008
Complicated things are often explained the best by making an analogy and using a simple real life example where people can relate to. Practical business examples and case studies that are based on a real project you worked on is also very good, but there is often the problem that you cannot share all relevant data and thoughts with the public, due to business interest and secrets that need to be protected.
Sure, the big successes and big blunders will make it out into the public, but those are not the best examples to be used for your average day to day stuff. Most things in life happen in between the two extremes and are, frankly speaking, boring. Try to talk to a friend or spouse about what you did at work on an average day and you will know what I mean with "boring".
Let's use Social Media as a (popular) example and its impact on traditional media publishing. (more...)
5/23/2008
5/18/2008
Yesterday I did read following post at Linda Buqets 5 Star Affiliate Programs Forums in the Newbies forum.
Hello Linda,
I am yet to be making $100 per day. I am still very far from it. Could you, please, let us into some of those programs where one can earn up to $100 per day?
Thanks in advance,
Linda provided a brief and correct answer and I wanted to elaborate on it via a post response myself.
And as it happens so often when I am indenting to write a "short" response, the things gets longer and longer and eventually decide to make it a full blog post of its own, because I believe that it is too precious to get lost in the vast ocean of messages in a webmasters forum.
I will post a link to this post at the forum instead. Linda is fortunately not against linking to highly relevant posts and articles on other websites and even encourages it. The emphasis is on "highly relevant"; somewhat distant related does not qualify, except for the qualification as spam.
Down to Business
Okay, now back to my answer of that post.
$100 in profits per day from a single program is not that easy.
If it is a revenue share offer you have to do the following math to find out the amount of sales you need in order to make $100 in profits.
$ Profit + $ cost------------------- = $ Sales% Commission / 100
Now we have to assume that you spend less than $100 for every $100 in commission, because if that is not the case, then you are losing money and not making a penny.
$ Profits = $100, $ Cost = $0 - $99.99 (let's assume you are doing PPC and a cost of $50 for every $100 in commissions, = $100 in costs in order to make $100 in profits). I will assume a 10% commission by the advertiser for this little example.
Based on that equation would be the sales that you have to generate for the advertiser to be $2,000.
Now look at the average order size of the merchant, which really depends on the type of products the merchant is selling. DoubleClick reported $139 as average order value (across the board) in Q3 2004. Let's be pessimistic and assume $125 per order. That means that you would need 16 orders to make $2,000 in sales.
Conversion Rate Considerations
Conversion rates differ from merchant to merchant. Everything less than 1% of the clicks resulting in a commissionable transaction is poor and should make you think about if it is worth to promote the merchant. Everything above 1% is good. Anything in the double digit range is terrific (if not accomplished by brand bidding or other methods that might/probably be prohibited by the merchant).
Since PPC and organic search as well, is "pull" marketing where you provide an offer for something that the user is searching or looking for, conversions tend to be higher than the 1%. A study by WebsideStory from 2006 shows a median order conversion rate of 3.4% for paid search listings and 3.13% for organic search listings).
Let's take the 1% as measure (to be conservative).
1/100 converts and you need 16 conversions = 1,600 clicks.
Now you have a figure to work with as a rule of thumb. Details vary of course per industry. You can redo the calculation for any combination of merchant and industry.
Higher commissions and higher sales tickets usually cause the market to be a bit more competitive than for smaller ticket items and lower commission niches. This is specifically true for pay-per-click.
To extend the calculation to pay per click campaigns, consider that based on a MarketingSherpa survey from 2004, the average click-through rate for PPC ads the asked advertisers were getting was 3.6%, which means that you need about 45,000 ad impressions (give or take a few hundred) to get to the 1,600 clicks. That's a lot of searches on a single day and chances are good that the PPC positions are well filled with ads by others already.
The bid price is probably high as well and you as a beginner will have a hard time to compete with some of the pro's up there who not only know what they are doing, but probably also have a much older and trusted account to get around some of the issues and penalties a new account can become subject to.
The Backdoor Approach
So you have to go long tail and search for phrases that are relevant (the less relevant, the lower the conversion, if the ad is not skewed to make it seemingly more relevant than it actually is. If it is skewed, then you click through rate will remain high, but your conversion rate will suffer, because people will find out that the advertised product is not really what they expected and were originally looking for.
You can do the same calculations for organic search, only that you have the disadvantage there that it takes a while to get any results back and to find out if the keywords and phrases you optimized a page or site for is actually driving the amount of traffic that you hoped it would. Not to mention to find out, if the phrase is really relevant for your potential buyers of the advertised product(s) or not.
You can do some research with the numerous free and commercial keyword research tools. I have a large list available on my site for every need and budget. However, figures from such tools are only educated guesses. How good the guess is depends on the quality of the source of the data that are used by the tool. The higher price for the more expensive tools is usually justified by the fact that their sources are much better (and usually cost the tool provider a lot of money) than any of the free tools is able to provide.
$100 per Day is Not That Easy!
You see, $100 profit per day is not that easy, even for experienced marketers. If an affiliate makes $100 in profits with a single merchant, chances are good that the affiliate deploys multiple methods to generate traffic to the advertiser, from PPC, organic SEO, and social media, Email marketing etc. If you would break it down to $10 profit per day, per advertiser, you might be better off, because the requirements to make the $10 are much easier to meet than for the $100 profit goal. If you figured out a way to make the $10 profit, find out, if you can replicate the same methods used for the one merchant to use it with another merchant in a similar (not the same) or entirely different niche.
Many successful internet marketers are successful, because they are able to figure out certain methods that seem to work well and apply them to several different merchants. The details of the methods used might be different and for an outsider is maybe no similarity to recognize between one and another campaign by the same marketer, but there is one and that is exactly the edge the successful marketer has over the beginner and inexperienced one.
They learned those things by trial and error and I can tell from my own experience that I am not able to quantify everything to provide you with a detailed description of how I do it, even if I would want to do that. You might want to call it instinct or gut feeling. That instinct was developed naturally over the years. All the mistakes and errors made play into this as well as the successes. More the mistakes I would say, because my instincts tell me more often that I should not go a certain route than they tell me to go with one particular one.
Conclusion
Use this guide as a check list to calculate potential for an idea and to double check if it is worthwhile to spend time and energy on something or not.
You have to figure out the details for yourself. That is what makes up you, the marketer. If there would be a one guide fits it all system out there, you as marketer would not be necessary, because then the merchants could easily follow that guide by themselves and cut you out of the action.
In cases where specific details for an offer etc. leaked out for some reason, only a few were able to leverage it and make a decent profit, because the place becomes crowded quickly and everybody is doing the same thing, which changes the factors in the above equation again and make it quickly look not so good anymore.
That is the reason why no marketer will tell you any specifics for something that is profitable for him, unless he is out of his mind or has a different reason for telling you this. Once he tells somebody, the avalanche was put into motion and makes the nice and cozy space to advertise a lot more crowded and much less profitable.
Good luck with the discovery of your profitable methods and specific campaigns, merchants and products.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
References
5/18/2008
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made a revision to the original Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (called CAN-SPAM or the Act) after three years considering public comments.
The Commission received 152 comments and suggestions on the NPRM and 13,517 comments and suggestions on the ANPR from representatives of a broad spectrum of the online commerce industry, trade associations, individual consumers, and consumer and privacy advocates. The Commission vote to approve the Federal Register Notice was 4-0.
I decided to post about this update, because I like to point to the CAN-SPAM act as a good example for what you get as an industry, if you are unable to regulate yourself and specify any form of best practices to be able to distinguish themselves from unethical spammers. Although the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) was able to get some changes through before the final release of the act, but that you could best describe as damage control. The DMA was not involved when the act was originally developed. As you can see, the FTC was this time much more open to feedback and comments (I assume that one reason for that was the fact that the Act did nothing to reduce spam, but caused an outcry from legitimate advertisers instead).
If you are not familiar with the original CAN-SPAM act, here is a link to the document in PDF format at the FTC website.
The 4 points that were added to the original act address some of the practical issues that resulted from the original act, but none of them will have any impact on reducing the SPAM problem itself. If you hoped that you will receive less spam anytime soon, then you will be disappointed.
The FTC News release from May 12, 2008 summarizes the changes as follows:
- an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
- the definition of "sender" was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act's opt-out requirements;
- a "sender" of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act's requirement that a commercial e-mail display a "valid physical postal address"; and
- a definition of the term "person" was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM's obligations are not limited to natural persons
The full text of the Federal Register Notice can be found here (PDF).
MarketingSherpa released a short audio podcast with there Senior Reporter Chris Heine discussing the revision with Jeff Mills of eROI. Kenneth Corbin published on May 13, 2008 an article titled "FTC Tightens Up CAN-SPAM Rules" at InternetNews.com, which includes comments by Matt Wise of Q Interactive and Janis Kestenbaum, a staff attorney with the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Matt Wise said:
"Under the new rules, multiple advertisers collaborating on an e-mail campaign will have the opportunity to designate one as the sender, which will be required to identify itself in the "from" line.
The e-mails must contain a mechanism for a user to opt out of receiving future messages, which the designated sender will then be responsible for processing. "
Wise added
"that he hopes the new rules for multi-brand messages will streamline the unsubscribe process, with marketing companies such as his own taking on the responsibilities for maintaining opt-out lists."
Janis Kestenbaum said
"Also under the new rules, advertisers will be able to satisfy the requirement for including a postal address with a P.O. box or a private address. Previously, they had to include a corporate street address in their messages. "
The update will also include language to simplify the requirements of an opt-out process. Marketers will not be able to require consumers to pay a fee or furnish any data other than an e-mail address to process an opt-out request.
Jeff Mills expressed some concerns that this might create a problem for advertisers who require their customers to log-in to their account to update their email preferences. I don't think that there is too much reason for concern, based on the comments of Janis Kestenbaum who said that said the main impetus behind that update was to prevent companies from using consumers' request to opt out as a springboard to extort more information about them. Similarly, marketers will not be able to require consumers to visit more than one Web site to process an opt-out request, she said.
If the customer has an online account with an advertiser already, then I believe that those advertisers need to provide the means for the customer to simply opt-out by entering his email address into a form or something like that. This form could be used by pranksters to opt-out friends, colleagues or other people where the prankster knows the email address and assumes that the person is a subscriber to a specific newsletter. The owner of the email address would become pretty upset, if he suddenly does not get his email newsletter anymore. If I should be wrong, I strongly recommend that advertisers put something into their FAQ saying that they cannot control who is opting out who because of the new legal requirements by the FTC.
On a side note, the FTC left the deadline for complying with an opt-out request unchanged at 10 days.
The new rules will take effect 45 days after the FTC publishes the update in the Federal Register.
Here is a list with some additional legal resources that are relevant for internet marketers.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
5/11/2008
Mark Wielgus created last year in August a mash-up script for YouTube, Amazon.com and Ebay.com and released the code for free under the Creative Commons Share Alike licensing model at his blog 45n5.com.
I am interested into data feeds and web services myself and have extensive resources on my website about this subject available, including a reference to Marks script.
The script ceased working after the move of the eBay affiliate program from Commission Junction to in-house and Mark got several requests about updating the script to support the changed eBay API. He did not do it so far, but it gave him another idea, which makes a lot of sense to me.
I also get frequent requests for help with affiliate product data feeds and web services APIs from people who found my website and the already vast amount of resources to the subject. Feeds and API are very technical in nature and not as easy to learn like HTML for example. The goal is eventually to make those things easy to use for the normal person out there who has no degree in computer engineering and does not plan to get one either, just to do his affiliate marketing stuff.
There are services like popShops.com, DataFeedFile.com, GoldenCan.com, FeedShare.com and others that make product feed data much more accessible to average affiliates, however, the tools provided are usually somewhat limited, provide in most cases no benefit for organic search, since the widget code is JavaScript that pulls content on the fly for the visitor, but is invisible to search engine spiders, plus you have to sacrifice potential commission in some instances to the service provider in exchange for the service.
Mark decided to put his knowledge to use for a custom service type of arrangement. He announced at his daily video podcast today that he plans to provide tools and help to get mash-up sites, based on web services API and other sources up for you. You will not be held back by the technical requirements to work with those technologies and be able to focus on the website content and marketing ideas instead.
To keep the amount of affiliates manageable and also reduce the potential issue of competition between the affiliates he is going to support, Mark limits the number of people who will be able to sign-up for his service to 100. He is going to put up a community site at MashupMoney.com, where you can communicate with the other 99 guys openly and share tips and knowledge.
Mark said that the monthly fee for his service and the access to the community site will be $49 U.S. Dollars and that the goal is to make of course the $49 back in commissions for you and then some after that.
This sounds like a very fair deal to me, a bit cheap in my opinion ($4,900 before tax ain't that much money Mark. It is an even better bargain for Canadian affiliates these days, because the $49 are U.S. Dollars and not Canadian ones hehe). Don't expect that Mark will do all the work for you and you just pay the $49 and lean back watching commissions rolling in. He will take care of the technical aspects of things, but that alone is only part of the work that is needed to build something useful and eventually profitable.
If you were thinking about using web services and feeds in the past, but are not knowledgeable about web development and programming, this is your chance to get into it relatively fast, customized and without the need to become a programmer yourself, not to hire one for hundreds or thousands of Dollars.
Check it out! It's not live yet, but you can subscribe with your email and/or contact Mark directly, telling him that you are interested. Keep in mind, 100 is the cap (which is no marketing scheme or trick to press urgency) and I assume that it will be on a first come first serve basis.
Cheers!
5/8/2008
I came across this video podcast episode of PBS's Wired Science with Luis von Ahn, the guy who came up with "Captcha", those fuzzy looking words that you have to enter on websites sometimes as proof that you are human.
"Captcha" was developed to prevent automation (usually via scripting) of a process, such as the creation of a user account. "Captcha" images are not readable by computers. Also the deployment of OCR (optical character recognition) technologies to identify letters within images does not work. To prevent OCR technology to be effective is actually the reason why the images always look so funny and distorted. (more...)
5/4/2008
I revisited today an older post of mine that talks about paid links and the problems that I have with the way how Google is trying to solve the problem. One of the last comments to the post asked a question, which many professional SEOs probably asked themselves too. I never did, because I am not a professional SEO and clients to worry about.
However, the question caused some activity in my brain that was first a mix of sarcasm and cynic remarks and then turned into a fairy tale that I think is pretty funny and worthwhile sharing with you.
The tale uses metaphors and comparisons, but else completely fictitious. It is in part meant to entertain and in part to provide a different perspective on old and known issues. Who knows, it might triggers new ideas and a change of opinion of somebody who read it. If it does not, then I hope that you have at least a fun time reading it and like the story for its pure entertainment value. It is also weekend, hence a bit more casual and possibly a welcome break for somebody who is working on this Sunday. (more...)
5/2/2008
Somebody alerted me to an article for the May 2008 Issue of SmartMoney Magazine that was written by Anne Kadet and titled "A Penny For Your Clicks?" (Hence the title for my post, which I believe to be a bit more accurate than hers).
The article is short and bashing affiliate marketing as a whole based on incomplete facts, taking things out of content, lack of understanding of the subject matter, poorly chosen examples, I assume for convenience purposes and the misinterpretation of statements made by some individuals, due to the lack of knowledge of the context and background that were are crucial to avoid exactly those misinterpretations.
Okay, that was my bash. Now I want to be a bit more serious and specific. Like Jason Calacanis' keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2008, this article proof once more the conception that people have of the affiliate marketing industry. I partially excuse Jason for his lack of knowledge of the industry. Okay, I expected him to spend at least a little bit of time on background research as preparation for his Keynote speech at an Industry conference, not only to avoid looking stupid, but just to show some respect to the folks who choose to make affiliate marketing the livelihood. I guess he thought that the reputation that preceded him and his natural instincts and personal experiences are enough to cover this subject good enough.
To his credit I have to say that Jason realized after his Keynote speech stirred up some heated debate and created negative yet constructive and factual correct comments, that looking at things a bit more closely and checking it out to see for himself is may be not such a bad thing after all. He created an affiliate account at the Commission Junction affiliate network and discussed in March at one of the GeekCast podcast episodes, together with Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson, his first impressions and thought about how to utilize affiliate marketing as an additional and/or alternative means to monetize his human powered search engine "Mahalo".
Jason was not all wrong in what he said. He spelled out in plain words some of the old and still existing problems within the affiliate marketing space that were not solved to this day and in some cases not even talked about very much. He gave credits and showed respect for the intelligence and diligence of many affiliate marketers. But he also pointed out that these good resources should not be wasted on short scams to make a quick buck, but on something that creates lasting value for people.
He also warned that ignoring those issues will eventually cause harm and damage to everybody, including the affiliate marketers who play by the rules and provide extra value to users of the Internet.
In contradiction to Jason, Anne Kadet is a journalist of a respected publication where I cannot forgive the lack of doing due diligence and proper research of facts. Looking at her list of publications for SmartMoney Magazine, it seems that Anne specializes in writing short and blunt columns about issues in business and society with the goal to provoke or shock. Those are tabloid press type of methods and added to the more serious editorial content of the Magazine on purpose. The column name "Tough Customer" implies that the reader can expect some more biased and unfiltered content based on the personal opinion of its author.
The previous articles were harsh and most of the time not very friendly (you could call it a rant), but at least did the facts seem to be somewhat okay and correct. Her post about affiliate marketing was not. It was going from one false premise to the next, building piece by piece a picture of the industry that is a distortion of reality at best.
Let's address each of those errors one by one.
When Jason Calacanis started his keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2008 on February 25, 2008 with the sentence "Affiliate Marketing is bull****!" he made a joke and did not actually mean it. To understand this joke, you have to look back a little bit, specifically December 7, 2006 when Jason said during his keynote interview at SES Chicago 2006 with Danny Sullivan that "SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is bull****!". That stirred up the search marketing community afterwards and caused some extensive debates and more.
When it was announced by Affiliate Summit in September 2007, that Jason Calacanis will be the Keynote speaker at the next Affiliate Summit, speculations were made what he might say, including whether or not "Affiliate Marketing is Bull!" and other things. His comment to the speculations was:
"Hmmm.... I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about just yet. I think the pollution of the internet is a key issue so maybe I'll work on that angle over the next couple of months. I can tell you that many, many people will shocked, offended, and disturbed after my presentation."
He did not call the attendees of the conference "the bottom of the food chain". This is taken out of context and not directed towards the audience specifically. You can listen and/or watch for yourself what he actually said to whom and why. His keynote speech at Affiliate Summit West 2008 on Monday, February 25, 2008 at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada is publicly available in audio format and video recording.
Anne talks about how easy it is to become an affiliate and makes it sound like a bad thing. Many think that it is still too hard and complicated and should be made easier even more. What is not implied in "easy" is the notion of "irresponsible" or "insecure". Becoming an affiliate during your lunch hour should not be a problem or you should revisit your application process. It should in fact only take a little bit of your lunch break that you still have enough time left to eat lunch as you are supposed to do.
The mentioning that only one of 9 advertisers who accepted her, called her is probably factually correct, but she did not mention
Not mentioned was the fact that there are plenty of other methods and ways to verify the existence and correctness of an affiliate application. Verification by phone is actually not one of the best methods to screen affiliates, because a phone call does not let you determine, if the affiliate might be an illegitimate business or engages in unethical or worse, illegal business practices.
It is true that this area within affiliate marketing has still plenty of room for improvement and is by far not where most people would like it to be, but it is also true that this is an area where many improvements were made during the past 5+ years. One example as demonstration is the change in percentage of advertisers who automatically approved anybody who applied to their program versus manual approval and/or doing at least some background checks of the affiliates who applied to the program.
While most programs auto approved and never or rarely checked any of their affiliate applications 7-8 years ago, did based on the AffStat reports, by 2006 over 80% and by 2007 over 90% of advertisers approve their affiliates manually.
There was a decrease to 75% in 2008, which seems to indicate a step backwards, but it must be said that the question for the statistic was very specific and in my opinion a little bit too specific. It asked "Do you approve affiliates automatically or manually?" More appropriate and important is the question "Do you check the background and correctness of affiliate applications within a reasonable amount of time after you received the application?" Then you could ask about the details of those checks and how much percent of applications are typically rejected as a direct result of those checks. There are no figures available for those things, but from talks with advertisers via email, phone or in person at conferences like Affiliate Summit do those numbers seem to have a positive tendency. Getting some hard figures does not hurt though, maybe for AffStat 2009?!
Then did Anne started to rant and moved away from facts and specific to generalized stuff that is mostly based on personal experience and conception and in many cases not even related to affiliate marketing at all. She referred to the large auto generated websites that are in essence a mash up of other websites content to some meaningless mumbo jumbo that is worthless to anybody and was created for the sole purpose of spamming the crawler based search engines like Google and Yahoo! To get traffic to those junk pages and diverting them via paid links from contextual ads embedded in those junk pages to earn a few cents on every click on those ads by the unfortunate visitor who ends up on one of those pages in his search for useful information at the search engine.
Those sites are called MFA sites or "Made for AdSense" sites, if they were created for the purpose that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. There are othe
