Commission Junction Damaging the Future of Affiliate Marketing!

If you're an affiliate marketer or read affiliate blogs, then you must have heard that Spybot Search and Destroy is now immunizing it's users against CJ links. Any Spybot user using this immunization feature will be lead to an error page after clicking a CJ link. No chance for a sale to be made for the affiliate, no affiliate cookie is ever set.

CPA-Affiliates wrote a blog article breaking this story and Shoemoney also wrote a nice follow-up. In the comments many people call on CJ to "fight against the Spybot program" or address / correct this issue with Spybot. I suggest CJ would do much better to address the root reason why these spyware protection programs block CJ/affiliate cookies.

Anyone in the industry knows that CJ permits too many shady practice affiliates to operate on their network. Much of an affiliate manager's daily activity with a program on CJ revolves around weeding out bad affiliates. Bad affiliates that are using shady practices such as browser hijacking through toolbars, cookie stuffing, forced redirects and forced clicks. Lip-service is paid to the CJ terms of service written against these practices, but true enforcement is passive and minimal at best. The short-term benefit from the added commission revenue just seems too tempting on a broad network-wide scale. However, short-term shady profit acquisition will damage the long-term health of the affiliate industry. Affiliate marketing's reputation will further slip toward the perception of shady/bad business.

Affiliate networks need to follow the Shareasale example, and clean up their act. Networks are making a few extra dollars now, but what happens when Google / Yahoo / Firefox / Spybot etc., start using this justification to block affiliate links and cookies on a much wider scale? What happens when merchants start taking a hard look at the bottom line and realize that shady affiliates are cannibalizing other sales channels and start bailing out of their programs in droves? Poor perceptions can quickly outweigh the perception of value found from hard-working, true value adding affiliates.

Clean up your act CJ, and gain further leverage with Spybot and other spyware programs to stop blocking affiliate links. Even a small step such as providing full click source data to merchants to view and audit could carry a long way toward cleaning things up.

If you have a program on CJ that is infested with bad affiliates and poor performance / ROI, consider seeking the services of an outsourced affiliate program manager before terminating your program.

Holiday Affiliate Campaign Preparation

Well, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Thanksgiving, they are all almost here and of course this means lots of consumer buying. For affiliate marketers, it means lots of site work, deal preparation, and testing. This is often times the busiest time of year, but for good reason, since it's usually the most profitable time of year.

Are you looking for help or guidance as to what you should be doing to prepare your affiliate business for the holidays?  Take a look at this Holiday Season Tips article prepared by the folks over at Share Results for some ideas and tips.  Some other ideas for niche research for the holidays can be found over at 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com

Many of the AMWSO merchant partners offer some revenue supercharging bonuses and consumer sale campaigns, so sign up for the AMWSO Affiliate Program News feed to get the latest breaking promotions and affiliate program news.

According to the Linkshare Holiday 2007 Trends reports, the top reasons people shop online during the holidays are:

1. Find discounts
2. Save time
3. Compare prices
4. Gift ideas

Free shipping is the most highly favored promotion according to consumers. followed closely by sales.

If you're still looking for ideas, don't forget to reach out to your affiliate manager. You affiliate manager is an excellent resource for ideas and help, and is all to often not thought of as an asset to be utilized when searching for help and ideas.

Affiliate Marketing Can Answer Consumer Online Ad Blindness

E-Consultancy reports on a Deloitte & Touche survey backing up what most of us already know, consumers are looking to avoid on-line advertisements. Blogs, online videos, social sites are all gaining users daily, and new users are becoming more adapt at training themselves to avoid advertisements as numerous eye-tracking studies have shown. Users have gone so far as to install ad-blocking software. Some of the highest rated and most popular add-ons for the Firefox browser include ad blocking modules.

Each quarter, business world publications release a slew of studies and surveys showing ad spending via the Internet is rising dramatically. More people are getting comfortable with using the Internet to make purchases and review and get information about products. Sure, if you're Coke or GM, slapping up banner ads on a cost per impression (CPM) basis makes sense. Their primary focus is to implant their brand in your minds, but if you're in the business of SELLING your merchandise via a website, an affiliate program is a vital tool for success.

Affiliate programs allow your affiliate partners to talk about your products, put text links right in front of their site visitors, and find other creative means for promoting your brand and products. Text links usually convert at a much higher rate than banners, and part of the reason is due to the inherent flexibility permitted with promoting a text link.

Relying on search pay per click is a great advertising tool, but to have a full Internet marketing arsenal an advertiser must also have affiliate partners. As users become more savvy searchers, the natural tendency is going to be to ignore those paid ads to the left and right of search results. Keep in mind; those users who are most comfortable with making purchases now, ARE already ad savvy. Build an affiliate program with high quality affiliates adding value to the sales process, and this could have an equal impact on sales as the pay per click efforts.

An affiliate program is one of the most efficient and cost-effective means for acquiring customers, provided that the program is not on auto-pilot. Manage the program effectively, keeping out parasites, BHO domain targeting, and effectively managing trademark bidders are part of the success formula for having a hugely profitable affiliate program. AMWSO affiliate program services can help you create a cost-effective, vibrant affiliate program that works in concert with other online marketing efforts.

Macau Affiliate Convention

While the CAC events have been mainly Casino focused through to 2006. This past year they have started opening the event to appeal to retail affiliate marketing too. Which is great for me with their next event being in Macau. I've not been to Macau before so this will be a great chance to see a new country and meet people in the Asia region. It's a two day event with presentations covering a range of topics with the core focus being on how to market in and to an Asian consumer base

I'm penciled in for a couple of presentations, though likely I'll focus on doing an "Affiliate Marketing 101" work shop (or two), it's great to be involved in teaching new people how to do affiliate marketing, and of course how to do it ethically!

If you'll be at the event or in Macau let me know as I have a day before and a day after free for meet, eat and drinks!

AMWSO will be at Ecomexpo

EcomExpo starts on Tuesday and the AMWSO team will be represented in force. This year, AMWSO is a gold sponsor at Ecomexpo, and we will have our own booth. The booth will be staffed throughout regular business hours with all of the lead affiliate managers representing all of the AMWSO managed affiliate programs.

Ecomexpo is a great venue (virtual expo) to really talk about business and start to build relationships with companies and individuals. Of course it cannot completely replace the social aspects one gets at a real world conference, but since it's virtual it really focuses the attention to specific business matters. A very good mix of disciplines will be represented, from affiliate marketing to SEO to lead generation and to contextual advertising. There will also be many presentation sessions on a variety of online business topics, which are all free during the Expo (October 9 through 11). Once the expo closes, one must pay for a pass to the Ecomexpo university to have access to the sessions and panels.

Whether you have a business selling goods and/or services looking for ways to promote online, or you're a publisher / affiliate looking for new partners to promote or ways to monetize your site, Ecomexpo is well worth checking out. Also, please do stop by the AMWSO booth and say hi!

Incentive Browser Plug-Ins / Add-ons Deceive Merchants, Rob Affiliates and Damage the Affiliate Marketing Industry

I was prompted to write this post upon reading about a fairly new Firefox browser add-on called CashAddOn. It was especially distasteful since I am an avid fan of Firefox and open source software, and users have the mistaken impression that his type of add-on is being endorsed by Mozilla and Firefox or that it’s gone through some kind of ethical / good behavior test.

Scott Jangro has an excellent write-up on the bad practice of Cashaddon operates.

From a consumer perspective, the idea of getting some cash back in addition to any regular coupon or discount is very attractive. Many consumers are not overly concerned that a nameless/faceless webmaster might have had his earned commission stolen due to the bad practice of this particular browser add-on.

The merchants that this add-on targets need to be made aware, that this is costing them money, sacrificing goodwill amongst knowledgeable affiliates, and providing NO added value in return. A comment in this discussion from Alex truly brings to light the lack of knowledge about how this add-on operates. The comment expounds the belief that merchants are HAPPY to have this kind of affiliate since it is driving added traffic to the merchant site. However, Cashaddon drives no traffic and adds no value at all. It simply leaches off the traffic ALREADY headed to a site, either via PPC, affiliate link, or simply natural search.

Partnering with affiliates that bring added value to your customer interactions provides the best way to really bring long-term prosperous benefit and growth to an affiliate program. Getting rid of these leaches from a program will not only benefit the bottom-line, but also help to build excellent positive relations with true affiliate partners that have a common interest in parallel success.

AMWSO and many other OPM firms have long promoted ethical and value-added affiliate marketing. If your affiliate program is overridden with parasites, and your other marketing channels are being cannibalized, contact us for a service review and let us apply our value-added principles to cleaning up your program and expanding your bottom-line.