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.

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.