WineExpress.com Affiliate Program Launches

I'm proud to announce that NETexponent has officially launched a new affiliate program today on the Performics platform for WineExpress.com. We're offering a $10 commission on all wine clubs and a 10% commission on all other products along with a 30 day return day policy.

WineExpress.com is the select wine shop partner to the Wine Enthusiast's catalog and website. Customers head to Wine Express for unique and exclusive wines that they would not find elsewhere. In addition to exclusivity, WineExpress.com is known for their quality, value, simplicity, and great service. Now is the perfect time to promote this line of products with the holiday season quickly approaching.

If you'd like to apply to become an affiliate for WineExpress.com please click here.

Facebook Is The World's Largest Poker Site

According to Casino Wire, more than 140,000 people a day are playing poker on Facebook.com through various applications. Pokerlistings.com tracks the major online poker websites and ranks Pokerstars.com as the number one with a peak of 134,000 players per day.

Great Article on Affiliate Summit

With Affiliate Summit Miami just a few days away, Adotas has a great feature article on the event:

http://www.adotas.com/2007/07/affiliate-summit-history-in-the-making/

The article takes us through the short history of how this has grown into the premier event for industry in just a few short years. It serves as a reminder that the main reason we go to these events is to network and connect with folks and not just for the stuff we learn at the sessions.

We haven't missed an Affiliate Summit since the first one, we'll continue to support this great event. We'll be giving away a Nintendo Wii at booth #7 - stop by and say hello.

Offensive Marketing - Somebody Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Walking to work today I passed a series of flyers up and down the street for what I thought was a missing person alert. Upon further inspection I see that it reads:

"I am looking for my wife. She has lost 187 lbs using portionpals (this is her before picture) and now that she is skinny I cannot find her. Please help!"

This is one of the most offensive advertising concepts one could possibly think of. Over 2300 people go missing each day in this country and this company creates a fake missing person flyer to sell a diet product?

I called PortionPals for a response and they told me that a "distributor" had posted the flyers and that once alerted to these ads they began taking them down but couldn't finish because of the rain. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since there was a pretty big storm here last night. In any case - its sunny out now and if I were them I'd get some people to finish the job.

Free Affiliate Summit Passes From NETexponent

Affiliate Summit is almost sold out, but we're giving away 1 full conference pass and 5 exhibit hall passes to the upcoming Affiliate Summit even in Miami.

Click Here for your chance to win:

http://www.netexponent.com/affsummitmiami07.shtml

Hurry - offer ends 6/20. We'll have a booth on the exhibit hall floor and I'll be hosting a round table session, so please stop by if you're planning to attend.

NETexponent Becomes First Agency To Partner with Tumri

I'm proud to announce that my company NETexponent has become the first agency to partner with Tumri, the world's first integrated merchandising and advertising network that intelligently delivers targeted products to online customers. The first 2 NETexponent clients to launch on this platform are Audible.com and WineEnthusiast.com. In case you missed all of the recent great press that they've been getting you can check it out here:

c/net
ClickZ
TechCrunch

Here is a video on how Tumri works, and you can see a cornerstore in action on the bottom right hand side of this page.

I'm very excited to work with the team over at Tumri - they've got a fantastic group of people that have really made this an exciting project to work on. The official release can be found here:

http://www.prweb.com//releases/2007/5/prweb527567.htm

Digg Users Revolt - Take over Homepage

Today is a very interesting day for social media. As reported on CogBox.com, a post came up yesterday on digg that contained a string of numbers and characters that cracked the security code on HD DVD's. After a cease and desist notification from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator) digg apparantly removed the posts and immediately suffered a backlash from their users. Several new posts were added, all of which made it to the homepage thanks to the user initiated voting system.

Digg Founder Kevin Rose posted this response last night:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

Digg was basically caught in a no-win situation. Remove the post and face extinction by having your users revolt and leave or face a potential lawsuit from an organization with very deep pockets. Win or lose you have to admire digg's stance.

No Joke - Incubeta Buys Revenews and CostPerNews.com

The ultimate April Fool's Day prank - Do something for real on April 1st that is big enough to make people think its a prank when it's really true. For 2 days now I just assumed the various posts about Incubeta buying both Revenews.com and CostPerNews.com were part of an elaborate hoax until I finally had to ask Revenews founder Wayne Porter what was up. To quote Wayne: "it is very, very real. You can confirm that publicly my friend, blog it, whatever- 100% truth- swear by a holy scallop" Those of you that know my scallop saga with Wayne know you can trust him when he swears on a scallop.

I have tremendous respect for all the parties involved in this deal. Vinny Lingham's Incubeta is one of the biggest and most professional search affiliate companies out there, Revenews has been an industry staple for nearly 10 years and Sam Harrelson's CostperNews.com was one of the best new sources for online and affiliate information.

I think we can expect some really great things from this brain trust - I can't wait to see what develops. For the full release click here, additional coverage here and here.

What's Going on with UK Affiliate Programs?

First the whole ASOS "Grubby little affiliates" thing (click here if you missed this one) and now UK travel site FlightMapping.com publicly blasts one of their merchant relationships for pulling the plug on their affiliate program:

"Flightmapping director, James Avery, said Flybe’s decision to cut its affiliate campaigns was unacceptable, adding: “It costs them virtually nothing to advertise through affiliates, and at just 1%, Flybe’s commission rate is one of the lowest in the business. How on earth can the airline have used up its budget?”

"Flybe has not played ball, and we find this particularly disappointing considering our tremendous respect for them as an airline. We hope our stance acts as a wake up call."

Finally some excellent advice:

“Learn to respect your affiliates, and they will continue to reward you with bookings at a considerably lower cost (up to 75% lower) than all of your other marketing channels,” he said."

I really have to wonder if Flybe or ASOS have any long term strategy in place as both seem extremely short sighted and misguided if they think they can treat affiliates this way and expect them to come back for more. Flybe should have considered themselves extremely lucky to have a site like FlightMapping.com promoting them for only 1% revenue share, instead they burned a bridge that seems unlikely to be repaired.

Not all Search Affiliates are Bad Guys

Kevin Lee would have you believe in his recent ClickZ article that affiliates engaging in search marketing are cheaters or only go after the "low hanging fruit" of search. I'd like to set a few things straight:

1. There are also numerous search firms that only go after the "low hanging fruit" and would not be able to run a profitable search campaign without trademarks.

2. He complains that PPC programs have budget caps while affiliate programs have unlimited budgets. This is typically true as affiliate programs only incur a media cost when a sale takes place - search programs have a media cost regardless of how many sales occur. I have never had one of our search clients run out of "budget" if we were reaching their desired efficiency. Remember that search agencies are typically paid on how much they spend, not per sale.

3. Do some affiliates break the rules? Of course there are always rogue sites out there but if you have the dedicated resources to running an affiliate program and you're aware of how affiliates are promoting your brand you typically run into very few problems. There are many honest affiliates that are making 6 and 7 figures a month and will not risk losing that by breaking the rules.

4. Kevin Lee talks about how more affiliate programs are becoming restrictive and only allow a few "power" affiliates to run search (in his words, "fewer cats to herd"). This is true in many cases, but these "power" sites and the advertiser both benefit from this scenario. By working in partnership and sharing information with a few top sites the advertiser is able to gain greater coverage on more keywords and block competition from valuable keywords. Talk to any affiliate about this strategy and they will agree its best even if they are not one of the sites allowed to perform search.

5. Search affiliates can add significant revenue - as far as I know Mr. Lee has never managed an affiliate program, but those of us that do know that search affiliates can add 10% - 30% or more to an affiliate program

6. Search and affiliate can co-exist. The reason why the search firms battle the affiliate guys is because they rarely are managed from the same cost center. If you have smart affiliates doing search, of course your search campaign may have lower volume, but the COMBINED volume from both channels will be greater. We've demonstrated this across several search and affiliate programs we've managed. The goal of every advertiser should be to get the greatest number of quality orders at the best efficiency regardless of channel.

7. Affiliates have the ability to do some things that no search agency can. Many search affiliates build landing pages and entire sites dedicated to a specific vertical. By building comparison sites they provide value to the users seeking information on the topic. For the advertiser they provide the opportunity to gain traffic from multiple ads on the search engine. For clients in a competitive category this can mean substantial incremental revenue.

Bottom line - don't assume that affiliates can't augment your search strategy. Know who your partners are and communicate with them. Share your learnings with them when you can and treat them as a partner, not a suspect.

Disclaimer - In case you didn't already know it, my firm NETexponent manages both search and affiliate programs for our clients. We believe in an integrated, holistic approach to marketing and that affiliates and search can co-exist in the marketplace.

BUMPzee is Hot

Scott Jangro's Bumpzee is really catching on, and I'm a big fan. It's been around for about a month now, and its a great blog community that is part digg, part linkedin, and part MySpace. When I joined about 3 weeks ago there were only about 25 other members and that number has already grown to more than 150. The coolest part for me is when 2 people add each other as friends you can view each other's contact information - in an industry that is built on relationships, being able to stay in touch with the important folks in our industry is key.

Check out the latest entries here - http://www.bumpzee.com/affiliatemarketing/entries/

Affiliate Summit Sold Out

AffiliateTip.com announced yesterday that the upcoming Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas has officially sold out. The event continues to grow each year and even with the added capacity it has sold out once again.

I'm really looking forward to this year's Vegas event for a number of reasons. The first is that NETexponent will have a booth on the exhibit hall floor (Booth #104 - please stop by). We'll also be running two of the vendor showcase tables - one dedicated to our client Shockwave.com, and another representing all of our client's affiliate programs. The Summit kicks off Sunday afternoon with some serious networking from 2pm - 6pm at the showcase tables. On Monday morning NETexponent Co-Founder and CEO Peter Figueredo will be speaking on an all-star panel featuring several of the top search affiliates in the industry. Joining Peter will be Vinny Lingham, Adam Viener, Steve Schaffer, and Dan Murray. Something new I'm also looking forward to is the Affiliate Summit Awards that will be given out Monday night. I'm proud to say I've been part of the Affiliate Summit Advisory Board that helped nominate the very deserving candidates. As always the most important aspect of the event is meeting face to face with the folks we do business with all year. Affiliate Summit along with the network events (CJU, Linkshare Symposium, etc) give us the best opportunity to sit down and connect with our partners.

Hope to see you there - if you missed the boat on Vegas, there is always Miami this summer.