CPA Talking | CPA Networks Talking, Making Money Online!

The affiliate.com crew is getting ready to leave the winter wonderland of Denver for the Big Apple next week to attend ad:tech New York.  This is always one of the best conferences of the year and we’re excited for the show’s big move to the Javits Center.  While the old venue at the Hilton was convenient, the show had definitely outgrown the facility.  This year, all the booths will be in one large exhibit hall, rather than split up over three floors, with some unlucky exhibitors in back corners and hallways.

If you are going to be in New York for the show, be sure to stop by our booth (#1212) and check out the latest affiliate.com promotional t-shirt.  We have limited quantities to give out, so make us one of your first stops when you get to the show.  Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker just featured the shirt on his blog today.  Check it out!

We will be sending our usual large contingent of Affiliate Managers and Advertising Account Execs to the show, including Doug Davis, Andrea Castaneda, Jason Jugert, Jazette Pester, Laura Nielsen, Brian Chase, Brittany Bankston, Jen Conlon, and Andrea Jantzen.  Everyone on the team will be at the booth regularly, so swing by and say hello.

We hope to see you in the Big Apple next week!

• Movie Trailer Friday: The Escapist Doesn't the popularity of prison break movies indicate that we, as a society, should be imprisoning fewer people? I can't tell you how eager I am to break out of prison, and I'm not even there. In Kansas City, where I grew up, drivers who have just passed a......
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The October 30 affiliate.com Newsletter is now available online.

Fail quickly.  Any successful online marketer will tell you that many of your campaigns and tests won’t be profitable.  This is especially true in PPC.  One of the keys to long term success is to quickly determine if a campaign isn’t working they way you expect and move on.

One of the biggest advantages of online marketing is that you can run a test and get results very quickly.  Be highly efficient in setting up and monitoring your tests.  Evaluate results as quickly as possible and make decisions to cut off tests that aren’t performing.

• Role of Exercise in a Diet Sometimes people wonder about the role of exercise in a diet. They ask if it is really necessary, and they wonder if using an extreme diet alone can lead to weight loss without the need for exercising. There may be a few who question to role of exercise in a......
• affiliate marketing program UK Web Host Pipe Ten Launches Hosting Affiliate Program March 1, 2010 -- UK-based web hosting provider Pipe Ten has partnered with marketing firm Affiliate Future to launch its new affiliate program, letting not only Pipe Ten customers, but all website owners to earn monthly commissions on Pipe Ten services. [affmage......
• Athlete Profiles: Anna Kournikova Although many only look at Anna Kournikova’s beauty, citing the fact that she’s never really done much in the sport of tennis, she is an accomplished player that has a remarkable attitude about the game and an innate talent. Born in Moscow in 1981, Kournikova began training as a tennis......

by Tom Wozniak, Marketing Director

It’s always interesting to watch a marketer think outside the box, utilize non-traditional methods and hit a marketing grand slam.  It can be a great motivator for marketers as they see someone else take a chance and achieve some serious success. While it isn’t in the affiliate marketing space, a recent marketing campaign for a new Hollywood movie is the latest example of someone turning the tried-and-true marketing establishment on its ear.

If you happened to catch the entertainment and movie news from the weekend, you may have noticed that a movie called Paranormal Activity was #1 at the box office.  The movie stands out from normal Hollywood fare for a number of reasons.  Number one - it was made by a virtually unknown director for approximately $11,000.  A large studio bought the movie, with possible plans to re-shoot the story with some big name actors and a big budget.  Those plans were changed and the film was released with a few minor tweaks.  The studio provided a truly minimal promotion budget, forcing the movie’s marketing team to come up with some innovative ways to get the movie in front of a small, but potentially vocal target audience and then encourage them to recommend the movie to their friends.

The movie was initially given limited screenings in a few college towns and promoted somewhat like The Blair Witch Project, in that it could be seen as a “true” story, rather than a Hollywood blockbuster.  Audiences reacted exactly as hoped and told their friends about the film.  The marketing team then utilized social media to let the audience mobilize and begin demanding that the movie be released in their towns.  The rest is movie marketing history in the making, as the film has earned over $62 million since its initial limited release.

Obviously, the clever marketing wouldn’t have done much good, if the movie hadn’t resonated with audiences.  But, it still stands out as an unbelievably successful use of so-called “non-traditional” media to connect with an audience in ways that most movies never aspire to.

As affiliate marketers, we aren’t generally involved in movie marketing (although I can certainly see performance-based marketing playing a role in online ticket sales) but, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some great lessons to be learned from this campaign.  The beauty of this type of word-of-mouth and social media marketing is that if it is done well, the audiences does most of the heavy lifting.  The marketer’s main goal is to do their best to support and facilitate the group, as it caries out the majority of the actual promotion.

Think about ways that you can leverage social media or other innovative methods to drive traffic to your websites and offers.   Not every outside the box idea will end up being a success, but you just might hit on one that will help you rise above the competition.

• Affiliate Marketing Success Checklist Listen, every affiliate marketer looks for the Niche that gives the biggest paycheck, right?  I know I do! Many times, however, affiliate marketers believe that success is some magic formula that is readily available to them.  Unfortunately, it's a little more complicated than that. Affiliate marketing success, is simply a......
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• How to Work Less and Make More Money With Multiple Streams of Income Most of us would like the chance to spend more time with our families, work a lot less and still bring in a sizeable income. If you’re only going to rely on your current income, the chances of that happening are pretty small, unless you’ve got an incredible job. However,......
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• Create Buzz with the help of the TPA Team Creating Buzz for your content is a major part of your online marketing efforts. If no one reads your content, you have no audience. Anyone who has spent any time trying to promote a blog or website knows how difficult and, often times, time consuming it can be to......

by Will Charland, Affiliate Manager

We have developed a new feature for viewing offers in the affiliate.com system that allows Publishers to see all active campaigns, including those which were set as “Private” which we now call “Select.”  The option allows every Publisher to view campaign landing pages, read campaign descriptions and gives you the ability to apply for permission to run these Select campaigns.

To search for offers in the system, type in a keyword in the text field.  (You can also run a category search by clicking on Offers by Category from the Offers menu.)  The system will return a group of offers based on your search parameters.  Here, you will be able to view the payout, EPC, and campaign description for each offer.  Clicking on the campaign name will bring you to the campaign’s description page.  This will let you know if the campaign is a Select offer or a Public offer.  If it is a Select offer that accepts your marketing traffic (Email, Search, etc.) and you wish to run the campaign, simply click on the “Apply” button to request permission to promote the offer.  To help expedite the approval process, contact your Affiliate Manager with information regarding the type of traffic you wish to send and any other information that may be useful in the application process.

We are in the process of making a number of additional changes to our system to further promote transparency and improve the value and overall user-experience of our system.  Future additions will include a quick links section to commonly used reports, links to our newest offers each day, a revenue chart, and a number of other improvements.  There will also be a section where your Affiliate Manager can post their top offers of the week, marketing tips, notes, news, and other useful information.

I encourage you to log in and check out these changes as they are rolled out over the upcoming weeks.  Please contact your Affiliate Manager with any comments or questions.

• Forex Cash Evolution -Cyberspaces Business - How To Quick And Easily Boost Your Website Traffic By Performing This Lone Thing Up to this point, we have been discussing search engine optimization (SEO) as it applies to effective internet marketing. SEO is a concept in online marketing that aims to bring your website to the top of the search engine results. Ranking well - the higher up the page your site......
• Practical Article Marketing Tips - Front Load Your Article Title With Keywords For More Traffic To get the traffic you want from Article Marketing, you need to craft a powerful eye catching and search engine catching title.One of the best ways to do this is to "front load your title with keywords."That's a fancy schmancy way of saying, "Make sure there are keywords in......
• Choosing a Phone and Voice Mail System Phone and voice mail systems can be pretty costly, even for companies with a low number of users. Before investing in any type of phone system or voice mail system, you need to estimate how much your company is likely to expand over the next few years. Failure to......
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