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.

Hybrid CPA Network "Turn" Launches

TechCrunch reports today:

"San Mateo startup Turn will unveil an interesting new advertising platform tomorrow at the Web 2.0 conference. It combines Cost Per Action bidding with a wide range of user, site and ad performance analytics. The company calls itself the world’s first automatic targeting, bidded CPA ad network."

I'm thrilled that CPA advertising is finally starting to hit a little more "mainstream" with guys like this and Jellyfish. For so many years I've felt that innovation has only been coming from inside our industry with very few new players taking a shot at making cost per action work.

Affiliate Search Engine Launches

Anik Singal over at Affiliate Classroom has utilized the new Google co-op search engine technology to build an affiliate industry specific search engine. You can check it out at Affoogle.com




You can see a full list of sites it pulls from here: http://www.affoogle.com/listed_sites.html and
it allows you to make suggestions as well. This execution reminds me a lot of Rollyo - a technology that lets you create your own search engine by combining several sites together.

John Battelle and Chris Anderson Discuss "The Long Tail"

About 185 people connected online at today's session of ecomXpo to hear John Battelle and Chris Anderson discuss the long tail of marketing.

Battelle is an excellent speaker and host and walked through the history of the book with Anderson and the impact the internet has had on how our behavior and shopping habits are changing. If you're not familiar with the book, I encourage you to check it out here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401302378?tag2=thelongtail-20

I plan to post more about my thoughts on The Long Tale in the coming days.

I've launched a New Blog

I've decided to keep this blog focused on the online marketing space and move my salesforce.com related posts to a new site called SaleforceCollective.com.

The 4 days I spent out at Dreamforce were motivating and sparked numerous ideas. I realized that most of what I've learned to date about Salesforce has been through blogs like SalesforceWatch.com and Perspectives on Salesforce and I hope to contribute back to the community.

-Chris

What the Heck is a Flog?

MediaPost recently posted an article about Walmart and their attempt to create a fake blog or "flog". The actual site is WalmartingAcrossAmerica, and the authors have already owned up to the situation, although they defend themselves by stating:

"We had heard that Wal-Mart's critics could be vicious in their attacks. Now we know those concerns were valid. And we kept our professional lives out of it, where we work and what we do for a living,— because this was not about the organizations we work for, I did this blog because I thought it would make a great story. Jim did this because we live together. We took vacation time in order to make this trip. We weren't out there as representatives of our employers, or anybody at all but ourselves.

So now we're being attacked. Why? Because we dared to write positive things about Wal-Mart. The people who hate Wal-Mart couldn'’t argue with anything we said,— we were writing about real people and telling true stories."

This isn't the first case of a fake blog, I found several interesting ones:

The Lincoln Fry - outed by: Strategic Public Relations
Gourmet Station - outed by: micropersuasion
Coke's Zero Movement - outed by Adrants.com

Amazingly someone at Walmart thought it would be a good idea, or maybe they just didn't think they would be caught. Debbie Weil, author of "The Corporate Blogging Book" said it best:

"This is so foolish on so many levels, it makes me scratch my head, everyone involved violated the basic rule: Be transparent. If you're found out, it comes back as a slap in the face."

I'm kind of puzzled myself that so many big companies would think this is a good idea. Trust is a tough thing for anyone to earn, especially in the consumer - corporation relationship. I guess the best we can hope for is that others just might learn from all of these mistakes.

Dreamforce 2006 Day 4

This morning's 3 breakout sessions wrapped up this year's Saleforce.com conference, and these 3 that I attended were actually 3 of the better breakouts I saw all week.

First up was the business mash-ups session on the developer track. While I'm not a developer, I'm really interested in API's and webservices functionality, especially as it related to Salesforce. There was a great presentation from infopia, and examples of how they've gone out to dozens of API's and integrated them into Salesforce for their clients. Spanning Partners also talked about integrating Google Calendar functionality within SF.

The next session was the community building session that featured 2 of the best Salesforce bloggers Mark from Salesforcewatch.com and Scott from Perspectives On Salesforce and ArrowPointe Consulting. Also on the panel was Joseph from LeverageSoftware. I really think the folks at Salesforce have done a great job to embrace community, especially on through the Successforce blog and on the Idea Exchange.

The last session of the conference for me was the professional edition roadmap presentation. At this point we've already seen most of these ideas in previous presentations and through the idea exchange, but a couple of ideas / future rollouts grabbed my interest: marketing tracking enhancements including click tracking - for an ROI focused marketer like me, this is a big development. SF loves their Google adwords tracking product and I think they want to expand this into new areas. Yahoo search tracking, organic search tracking and more are being considered. Salesforce wants to enable users to understand the context in which customers are interacting with us and this is definitely a good thing. Other cool ideas include saved search history and tagging features, both of which would make it easier to find our key data.

A couple of more photos, all of which and more can be found on Flickr.

Dreamforce 2006 Day 3

Marc Benioff got us started again this morning with an interesting introduction to the featured keynote General Colin Powell. General Powell got a standing ovation and was an excellent speaker. He talked for a long time and held the audience for most of that time with interesting anecdotes and the importance of corporate philanthropy, a topic that Mr. Benioff likes to remind us is covered in his new book. Powell took us through some examples of how he uses technology, and I was impressed to know that he actually understands Salesforce and its implications on the business world and government and has a great grasp on how the internet is making things move and change at a pace that humanity has never seen before. I really enjoyed his speech, but I think Powell lost most of the audience's attention when he began to explain the current political situations with various regions around the globe. At this point we had been listening to Benioff and Powell for more than 90 minutes. After Powell left the stage, various product demonstrations by executives from Symantec, Deutsche Bank, F5 Networks, Corporate Express, and Skype. Since Benioff and Powell ran so long, the general session went over by 45 minutes and people were walking out. Most of these "demonstrations" felt like sales pitches, but I liked seeing the real-world examples.

I headed back down to the exhibit hall to catch up with some vendors and ask some Salesforce staff some questions, and I thought I'd take a moment here to point out some booth "good guys" I met:

1. ModelMetrics - Thanks Adam for referring me to another vendor when I described the Salesforce customization I was looking for.
2. Before the Call - Really good bunch of folks offering instant access to a free version of their product. They also gave away a pair of tickets to the Oakland game that sadly I did not win.
3. Convenos - thanks for the Skype headset, and for clearly and concisely explaining your product without being pushy or salesy.
4. Salesforce - I had a specific question about Apex that nobody seemed to be able to answer but within minutes of leaving the booth I was on an email chain that had multiple people trying to track down an answer for me.
   

The booth poor conduct award goes to Eloqua: their team of hyper-aggressive salespeople wouldn't let you past their booth without several calls of "can I scan you?" from multiple people. Sure you got my contact information and already sent me an email, but you left me with a poor first impression.

A couple of pictures from today, all photos can be found on Flickr, tagged as Dreamforce2006. Other folks have added pictures to the dreamforce pool.




Finally, a special thanks to Kingsley Joseph of The Successforce Blog for reaching out to me and inviting me to a have a beer with some other Salesforce Bloggers.