How to Get More Traffic from YouTube

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2012-04-02

There’s absolutely no denying that YouTube has the biggest social community that engages in watching online video. Millions upon millions of active users contribute content to the site – uploading approximately one hour of video each second.

This just goes on to show that YouTube is a site that you should leverage to get traffic to your own site. The audience on YouTube can prove to be highly engaged and very responsive – if you give them the right content.

Now, let’s just say that you are able to get their attention and your videos are being watched. How do you convert these viewers into visitors to your website? How do you tempt them to pay a visit to your site and learn more about your offer?

Here are 5 tips to help you get more traffic coming in from YouTube – targeted and highly relevant:

1) Don’t Wait to Introduce Your Website – The reason why you created and uploaded your video to YouTube is to attract targeted visitors back to your site. So why delay in introducing your site to your viewers? Make sure you have your website listed right in the beginning of the video. It’s more like having a ‘branded intro’ so that your viewers know about your site.

2) Mention Your Brand Name – YouTube is a great place to upload videos to educate your viewers and presell your product. People like learning stuff – as long as you’re not selling them. If you are creating such video content then try to weave in your brand name into the script. Make it appear natural and non-hyped.

3) Leverage Annotations – If you want to get real, valuable traffic from YouTube, you need to think long term. This allows you to try out tactics that most tend to ignore – such as pushing your viewers to your other videos on YouTube. This can be done by including annotations in your videos which can be linked to other relevant YouTube videos. This helps you build a relationship with your viewers and gives them a reason to subscribe to your channel.

4) Create a Compelling Description – Every video that you upload to YouTube should have a compelling description that clearly explains what the video is about. This helps your target audience find your video on the web and lets you insert a link to your website or blog. See to it that your site’s link is mentioned right in the first sentence of the description. Apart from this, you should also have a convincing description for your YouTube channel so that people actually feel compelled to subscribe to it.

5) Have a Clear Ending – The way your video ends should leave an impact on the viewer. You need to have clear ending with a proper call to action, where you ask your viewers to visit to your site. Also, don’t end your video right away – give your viewers the time to read and note down your site’s URL.

What do you do to get more YouTube traffic to your site? Go ahead and comment below – we’d love to hear from you!

Mailers: California Spam Law Makes Hiding Illegal

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-04-02

9

A common practice amongst mailers is to use fictitious names for all their mailing companies, with PO Boxes and various domains registered to non-existent people. In fact, they ruled in Balsom Vs. Trancos, that pretty much all fake headers violate California Law. So now, according to this ruling, all commercial emails must include a domain name that that is registered to the actual sender.

Here are some quick tips that you need to think about:

1)   You must pretty much use a “from address” that comes from your actual domain.
2)   The domain must be able to be looked up with an accurate address and company name association. Putting down the name of the list instead of the corporation or entity sending the email will not be allowed.
3)   You CANNOT use a private registration

Again, the purpose of this law is to make sure that someone can accurately look up the real entity that is sending the email. Basically any attempt to hide who is sending the email using fake names, “list names” or fake identities will mean that you are in violation of the law and unfortunately can be held liable for a lot more money. Anti-Spam Lawyers will then most likely start looking at you and seek serious damages in order to extort money.

To make this clear, DO NOT try to hide your identity.

Highly recommend that you read Superstar Attorney Richard Newman’s article on this topic.

ClickBooth Leaving DirectTrack for Cake Marketing

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-04-02

9

Performance Marketing Insider has learned that ClickBooth, the mega-CPA network, has signed an agreement with Cake Marketing to become their affiliate CPA tracking system. They are currently being run on DirectTrack, owned by Digital River, and have been almost since their inception.

We reached out to ClickBooth for comment and a spokesperson told us that this was part of a 2-3 year process in which they considered all solutions. They commented that, “In our performance tests with Cake over the past 6 months they have been able to handle the billions of impressions and hundreds of millions of clicks we have thrown at them to test our current scale as the leading CPA network in the space.”

This comes at an unfortunate time, on the first day of ADTECH, the premiere conference for interactive advertising and marketing. Just a little over a month ago, DirectTrack suffered a massive outage, and that news become the buzz during LeadsCon. This will definitely raise a lot of questions about DirectTracks ability to compete in the marketplace that is now crowded by newer companies such as LinkTrust, HasOffers, Effectus, Cake and HitPath – all which are perceived to have more updated technology than the decade-plus old DirectTrack system.

Update: After this was published, Cake issued the following press release

NEWPORT BEACH, CA, Apr 02, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Cake Marketing, the Software as a Service (SaaS) division of Accelerize New Media, Inc. ACLZ 0.00% , announced its partnership with Clickbooth, a leading performance based network and winner of the Inc. Magazine Top 500 Fastest Growing Companies in Marketing and Advertising in 2009. The Cake Marketing platform will power Clickbooth’s CPA network operations, and provide advertisers and publishers a dynamic, reliable and innovative solution within the performance based marketing space. Cake Marketing is a robust platform designed to support the analytics, tracking and management of affiliate marketing companies, and evaluate the performance of marketing relationships to better optimize traffic and increase profits within the advertising funnel. As the largest global affiliate network, Clickbooth’s partnership with Cake Marketing validates the years of development, testing and usage of the Cake Marketing platform in the marketplace. Collaborating with large-scale brands, advertisers and leading affiliate networks, Cake Marketing has quickly become an industry leader within the tracking space.

With servers in multiple locations providing fully replicated and trusted network uptime, the Cake Marketing platform will manage Clickbooth’s entire CPA network from click to conversion with precision and real-time reporting. In addition to providing the tracking infrastructure, Cake Marketing makes their 24/7 phone, email, and ticket support a top priority for clients.

“Partnering with Clickbooth is a groundbreaking and exciting time as we have the opportunity to work with a company that will take full advantage of the major investment we have made in our platform’s infrastructure to support a global enterprise network,” said Jeff McCollum, President of Cake Marketing. With its continued innovation and tracking capabilities, Cake Marketing is gaining considerable market share within the performance advertising space and steadily adding new clients.

Cake Marketing’s patent pending technology offers affiliates and marketers a flexible yet powerful solution allowing for custom features and innovative ideas to increase productivity and improve the life cycle of online campaigns.

“After evaluating competing platforms and entertaining the idea of building a proprietary platform, we were extremely impressed with what the Cake Marketing tracking technology could do for our company as we continue to grow and enhance our global traffic with speed and efficiency,” said John Lemp,” CEO of Clickbooth.

In addition to providing the tracking and analytics for Clickbooth’s web-based campaigns, the Cake Marketing platform will also provide the tracking tools allowing advertisers to offer mobile installs and actions within an app. With this robust functionality, Clickbooth can now take advantage of Mobile Marketing, the fastest growing segment of Performance Based Marketing, thus opening up multiple streams of revenue for Clickbooth and their affiliates.

Cake Marketing is sponsoring the Clickbooth party at Adtech San Francisco April 3rd and Clickbooth will be exhibiting at booth #1509 April 3rd-4th.

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Checkout ClickBooth and Cake’s Party at ADTECH

3 Tips to Leverage Pinterest for Marketing

By

Mustafa Khundmiri

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2012-03-31

10

The Pinterest craze is spreading across the web like wildfire, and there’s no stopping to it. The site is on its way to social media domination. However, online marketers are still trying hard to figure out how Pinterest can be used to get the word out about their product, get some targeted leads or just some relevant exposure.

Integrating Pinterest into your marketing mix shouldn’t be hard, as long as you know what you want to achieve from it. The following article delves into 3 unique tips to help you get the most out of Pinterest in terms of marketing that gives results:

1) Have a Plan Up Your Sleeves

There’s not much that can happen without a plan, and the same goes for your pinning activity on Pinterest. You need to know where you’re going and what you seek to achieve from Pinterest and how it can help you with your online business goals. Determine if you’re pinning for:

Getting targeted traffic to your website or blog
Building brand awareness and taking your web business to the next level
Creating a community of interested people that you can market to later on
Striking new relationships that will help you connect with your target audience
Pre-selling your product and educating people about your market

There are so many different goals that you can work on when using Pinterest for marketing purposes. However, it’s important that you achieve real clarity first. Each of your well planned goal helps you:

Use Pinterest to get the maximum leverage out of it
Create boards that will attract the right people
Curate pins that will actually be re-pinned, giving you the viral advantage of the social network

You need to be laser focused on your objectives, but at the same time be flexible so that you don’t miss out on any opportunities. Also, see to it that you’ve got rules and regulations that you follow to ensure that your team and collaborators understand what to do.

2) Find Your Target Audience

Researching Pinterest and doing your homework is crucial if you want to launch successful marketing campaigns on the social site. You want to make sure that the type of consumers you are targeting are actually an active part of the Pinterest community.

Even though Pinterest is 98 percent women, understand that not every women on the social network is pinning consistently. Also, this doesn’t mean that Pinterest cannot be used to target men.

The idea is to look beyond your target audience and find influencers who can help you spread your message widely on the network.

3) Know What You Want to Communicate

Using Pinterest for marketing is all about understanding your audience and knowing what and how to determine the right message. You should have a clear picture of what you want to communicate to them.

Now, Pinterest is not just a social site with a bunch of images, it’s much more than that. Knowing this, it’s important that you clearly lay down your strategy on making your picture worth a thousand words. Each and every image that you pin and repin sends a strong message, making a formidable impact on your audience.

While you can always add your own perspective to the images you share, you should also see to it that you are carefully choosing the right ones to pin/repin. The message that you send out should be consistent.

How are you using Pinterest for your marketing? Are there any specific tips or ideas that you would like to share with us? Please do comment below!

Plenty of Fish Sued for Photo of Dead Soldier

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-30

7

Last month Plenty of Fish, POF was sued for using a dead soldiers photo in ads for “Military Man Searching for Love. Army Lt. Peter Burks parents have sued PoF and True.com for using the photo without permission.

“The implication is that, if you click here, this is one of our members. This is somebody you’ll meet — and people like him — when this fallen hero has been dead three or four years,” said their attorney.

After reading the case, it looks like some affiliate actually stole the photo, put an advertisement on PoF for True.com. In fact, this is what they told the media – and yet, their name has been smeared because of this stupid affiliate.

This of course raises tons of questions about using people’s photos from the web in advertisements that you make. Honestly, I think most of the industry can say that at one time if they’ve tested anything with those platforms, they have “stolen” an image or two.

A few months ago I published the very popular article about A Married Woman who Sued Match for Photos. It seems that some affiliate used her likeness to promote Match.com on Facebook. Following that story it seems there are tons of similar articles that have come on, raising the question about the ethics of stealing photos from the web and using them.

What is the problem here right? While its most likely illegal to use people’s photos without permission, there raises a total other issue: that people lives can be destroyed when their likeness shows up. It seems that this issue happens most when it comes to dating websites, that people are finding their photos in advertisements every where, often by affiliates, implying that they are single.

In the case of the killed soldier, the photo was just offensive.

The site Lovely-Bones.com, which no longer works, actually early this year decided to scrape over 250k profiles without their knowledge and then add them to a dating site. Of course, people were amazed to find out that many of them were looking for love, even through they were actually married.

Over at Mike Young Law, he mentions where a well-known super model had her photo used by a dating service (Escort Service?) DNA Diamonds. She of course sued.

As Mike Young put it,

It should remind you and other Internet marketers not to use photos or images on your websites unless you have the legal right to do so. When in doubt, either get written permission or don’t use the photo. There’s plenty of stock photography and public domain pics available for you to use without risking a lawsuit. If you really want to use a photo but can’t pin down ownership, have your Web lawyer do it for you.

Don’t steal photos from the web, no matter how much you might think it makes your life easier. Not only can it be in bad taste, but if you are caught, you might not get paid for the campaign, or worse be sued and humiliated on the web for being the idiot who used a dead soldiers likeness for a an advertisement.

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Sponsored by LeapLap: Unique Offers.

Self-Serve Mobile Ads Available

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-29

1

ADOTAS – Mobile signup ad platform Pontiflex launched a self-service feature called AdLeads today. The new service, said Pontiflex CEO and co-founder Zephrin Lasker, is “the next step after Google AdWords — a very analogous situation with us.” According to a release from the company, AdLeads allows businesses to create geotargeted signup campaigns for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, and according to Lasker, “It takes anywhere from five to 20 minutes to build a campaign.” And because these are signup ads — while using an app, the user sees a notice on his or her mobile screen with an offer to which he or she can either opt into or decline — the advertiser pays when users actually sign up, which differs from a cost per click or cost per impression model and potentially (if not certainly) brings a more engaged kind of consumer to the business. The prospect of being able to create targeted ad campaigns in a self-serve model, within minutes, and with a possibly higher chance that you’re attracting users who want to know about your business, clearly has appeal for smaller businesses. In fact, Lasker said that since AdLeads’ beta launch, “we’ve had close to 500 inquiries.”

While AdLeads might appeal to SMBs, Lasker pointed out Pontiflex has “had a few years to test this with major advertisers,” and “that gives us a great model. The system is very good at guessing what you should spend and who your audience is.” After designating a budget and selecting a business category, he said, “when you hit the ‘next’ button, we have an algorithm that figures out what data you’ll need for what apps.” And after the ad is completed, Lasker explained, “the goal is to keep people in the app. Mobile apps [often] kick you out of the app and into a browser,” but he elaborated, “We’re not particularly rich-media. There’s always a big ‘No Thanks’ button. Always, the point was to be as minimally disruptive as possible.”

It sounds simple, but Lasker said his company operates from “the idea that the user knows what they want and they’ll find it,” he said. “If you ask people to tell you what they want, they will. Pull, based on what they want, instead of pushing something on them.” With the signup model, he said, “you’re only going to [opt in] if you’re interested,” and he described the end result as “ROI-positive.”

Build Your Own Offer and Cross-Sell

By

Trent Silver

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2012-03-29

3

I’m a huge fan of diversifying business ventures and cross-selling to increase the bottom line. Why should you cross-sell to your consumers?

Make more money by selling additional products and services to consumers who are already interested in what you’re offering
Protecting yourself against regulation of verticals; if one industry becomes obsolete you’ve built other quality businesses that continue to generate revenue.

This article is about the first point – making more money. The more complementary offers, products and services you can offer to your particular demographic, naturally the more money you will make. You’ve already made your initial sale or generated your initial lead – why not keep it going?

Here’s how I did it: I spent three years running a direct mail-in cash for gold business, buying gold through the mail and refining it. I also have businesses that generate payday loan/cash advance leads and sell directly to lenders. I have a business that generates auto title loan leads for lenders as well. I have a business that generates cash for electronics leads. The point here is that my consumer-facing web properties offer consumers more than just one option to get instant cash. The trick is to gain experience and knowledge in multiple complementary verticals. If you can master three or four business models in the same industry, you’re going to beat out the guy that specializes in just one business every time.

1. I’ve positioned my businesses in a unique way; while my competitors are either mono-line payday loan guys, cash for gold buyers or auto title lead generators, I’ve built businesses around all of the options. So if a customer requests a payday loan and doesn’t qualify for the full amount they need, not only do I make my money off selling the lead, but I then offer them the opportunity to sell their gold AND electronics for additional cash, or get an auto title loan. Options, options, options.

2. The important thing here is I am not just up-selling another relevant offer. When you OWN all of the complementary offers yourself, you have full control and deliver more value and more options for the consumer. By the time the whole sales process is done with one of my competitors, a customer might end up with a $300 or $400 payday loan. With my lead funnel, by the time the customer is finished they’ve gotten their $300-$500 loan, sold their gold, sold their electronics and have potentially made out with several thousand dollars. So I make 3x-4x as much as if I had a mono-line business with no other offers, my customers get more options, more cash.

3. I can offer my publishers higher payouts for leads and enticing rev-share back-end deals that my competitors can’t match because I am 3-4x more profitable than the mono-line businesses. This is how you take over an entire industry, leverage a competitive advantage and then take over traffic.

4. When you own the offers yourself, there’s no possibility for your data to be destroyed. You can monetize it with a few trusted emailers, call centers and SMS publishers. You can push your own complementary offers and referral programs to get your customer’s friends and family members interested as well.

This setup is designed for longevity. If you want to run an offer for 3-4 months and make some quick cash, then move onto something else – this is not for you. If you want to build a real, long-term business that offers value to the consumer across multiple product offerings, establish real partnerships with publishers and affiliates and build a profitable business then build your financial models, design your sales pages and launch!

Siri Sued by Angry Californian

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-29

7

Siri, the voice-activated lady who can help you with your Apple Iphone 4S, has been sued for overselling its abilities in TV commercials. According to the lawsuit, filed by David Jones in the Los Angeles District court, Siri doesn’t do anything similar to what is shown in commercials, and because of that Apple is using deceptive advertising to promote its product.

The lawsuit says, “”Through its nationwide multimedia marketing campaign, Apple disseminates false and deceptive representations regarding the functionality of the Siri feature,”

“For example, in many of Apple’s television commercials, consumers are shown using Siri to make appointments, find restaurants, and even to learn the guitar chords to classic rock songs. In its advertisements, Apple depicts these tasks as easily accomplished “just by asking” Siri,”’

Why is this important to marketers? Well, as you know, the FTC is cracking down more and more on deceptive practices, and as more and more consumers are educated, they are taking more and more legal actions. While the Siri lawsuit might seem silly, it shows that we are living in a very litigious world and need to understand the contest of everything that is being sold. It’s important to make sure that you have a good Internet Attorney, who can advise you on what steps you can take to protect yourself.

Study: CPM Rates Do Not Equal Value

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-28

8

Interesting news out of the fine folks at Comscore today, where they kindly point out that the price you pay CPM has nothing whatsoever to do with the value of the advertisement. What’s new, I’ve been saying this for years, pointing out that with the industry rife with fraud, people not seeing advertisements and brand media buyers just lazy, you never get what you pay for. According to the study, which used 1.8 Billion impressions from advertisers like Allstate, Ford and General Mills, there is absolutely no correlation to a price you pay, and the value of those ads.

These handy charts that they provide shows that unfortunately, just because an advertisement is not seen, doesn’t mean that you actually pay a lower price. Meaning that people sometimes are charges just as much for ads that aren’t seen as the ads that are seen. Remember, approximately 30% of all ads are complete crap.

What does this show you? That the CPM marketplace that is full of exchanges, re-sold inventory and completely junk exists to make lazy media buyers happy. Again, this goes back to what the Performance Marketing industry has said over and over again: that these exchanges need to be focused on ROI and perhaps CPA advertisements. Most inventory is junk and needs to be sold on a performance-only basis.

React2Media Merges with ad pepper media US

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-28

0

Interactive marketing technology company React2Media and ad pepper media USA, known for its semantic-based targeting and RTB technologies, today announced a merger in which ad pepper media’s display products and services – iSense, SiteScreen and the RTB platform adEXplorer – will now be represented in the U.S. by React2Media.

“Combining forces with ad pepper media allows us to offer a superior video platform with real-time bidding and semantic targeting capabilities while providing transparency for our advertisers,” said Alex Schaller, CEO and co-founder of React2Media. “Having helped adpepper introduce iSense to the U.S. market in 2007, we have a great history working together and are thrilled to move forward as a team to offer clients a more comprehensive, cost-effective suite of advertising technology solutions.”

Integrating ad pepper media’s real-time bidding solution adEXplorer into Act2 – React2Media’s comScore-rated video ad network – delivers relevant ads at significantly lower rates than currently available pre-roll video ad units. The adEXplorer platform outperforms current technology solutions and provides the following functionality:

• Page-level semantic technology integration – Enables language detection, targeting against more than 3,800 categories, prevention of ad misplacements via SiteScreen covering 18 controversial content filters in 12 different languages.
• Adaptive bidding – Allows bid values automatically adjusted to meet both financial and campaign performance objectives
• Automated algorithmic campaign monitoring – Includes unique URL-level semantic optimization
• URL-level campaign reporting – Provides full delivery and performance transparency down to every impression in which ads were served.
• Audience Retargeting – Enables precise audience retargeting across RTB exchanges

With the addition of iSense’s capabilities, including true semantic display ads, React2Media will now also serve video ads that are contextually relevant based on what users are reading
or viewing in real-time. Additionally, ad pepper media’s SiteScreen prevents ads from appearing next to objectionable content so that brand integrity is protected.

“We pride ourselves on not just volume, but quality. Having a vast network of top-tier websites with unprecedented global reach is just one step, protecting the integrity of our clients’ brands is the next,” said Schaller. “There is an ever-growing field of video ad networks so we work tirelessly to develop and perfect our strategies. By merging with ad pepper media’s U.S. display business, we help to set ourselves – and as result, our clients’ digital campaigns – apart from the rest.”

Vergonomix aka Vergo Interactive

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-27

4

At VergoNomix we specialize in performance-based affiliate marketing and Cost-Per-Action (CPA, CPL, CPC) online lead generation campaigns. We connect online advertisers with consumers across numerous industries to produce actionable results.

VERGO Interactive connects institutions of higher learning with students exploring options for post-secondary education. Through innovative research, information and expert advice, VERGO Interactive enables potential students to find schools that fit their degree and career goals.

AKA: Vergo, Vergo Interactive, Vergo Marketing.

LeadsCon Acquired in Huge Buyout

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-27

0

After playing in the TV show friends for many years, Jay Weintraub set his sights on starting the leading, umm… lead generation conference, LeadsCon. We are happy to announce that he’s entered the big leagues now, selling his company for a large sum of cash. A personal congrats to my friend and colleague, Jay. Access Intelligence, a leading marketing company providing business intelligence and integrated marketing solutions in several global market sectors, announced today that they have acquired LeadsCon, the online lead generation conference series. The deal was backed by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private investment firm based in New York and London.

Jay Weintraub, the president and founder of LeadsCon, will stay on in his current role but will also serve alongside LeadsCon co-founder and executive vice president of operations Michelle Troop as members of Access Intelligence’s new Customer Acquisition Board, whose goal is to “oversee the execution of a multi-platform strategic plan to provide the marketing community with top-drawer content, intelligence and business opportunities in the multibillion-dollar customer acquisition market.”

The full press release outlining the acquisition is below:

Integrated media company Access Intelligence announced today the acquisition of LeadsCon, which serves the online lead generation industry through two preeminent conferences and other best-in-class content offerings for lead-generation marketers. With Access Intelligence’s existing stronghold in media, public relations and event marketing, this transaction extends the company’s position with service offerings focusing on customer acquisition through advanced marketing technologies and strategies.

LeadsCon is the industry’s preeminent educational and networking conference dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of those operating in the online lead generation industry. LeadsCon (www.leadscon.com) is held twice a year, having just completed a record event this past February in Las Vegas, and will hold its East coast event in New York this July. Other products in the LeadsCon portfolio include the membership-based LeadsCouncil, the Daily Deal Summit conference series taking place this April 17-18 in New York (www.dailydealsummit.com), an e- newsletter, and other soon-to-be announced marketing conferences and product offerings.

Jay Weintraub, president and founder of New York-based LeadsCon, will continue in his role as President of LeadsCon, Daily Deal and the other products serving the customer-acquisition sector. Michelle Troop, LeadsCon co-founder and executive vice president of operations, and Weintraub will be part of the newly created Access Intelligence Customer Acquisition Board which will also include Don Pazour, AI’s President & CEO; Diane Schwartz, senior vice president of the Media/Communications Group; and Jenn Heinold, vice president of healthcare and aerospace events. The Board will oversee the execution of a multi-platform strategic plan to provide the marketing community with top-drawer content, intelligence and business opportunities in the multibillion-dollar customer acquisition market.

“I am particularly pleased to be working with a visionary like Jay Weintraub, who will lead our efforts in serving the customer acquisition professional community,” said Don Pazour, president and CEO of Access Intelligence. “The ability to round out our position in the marketing and technology sectors with highly engaged brands like LeadsCon and Daily Deal Summit is an exciting prospect for Access Intelligence, our employees and customers.”

Jay Weintraub said, “Access Intelligence shares our passion and commitment to those we serve. With their backing, and support, we will continue to improve our operations and create new products and services faster than we could do on our own. I look forward to many more years of creating definitive summits for the online lead generation industry and broader customer acquisition ecosystem.”

The acquisition marks Access Intelligence’s continued investment in high-performing properties with engaged audiences and best-in-class products and services. In 2011, Access Intelligence completed acquisitions in the media/marketing and healthcare sectors, including that of Red7 Media (which includes Event Marketer and Folio); OR Manager, which presents one of the largest trade shows serving operating room executives; and Cynopsis Media, with advertising- driven e-letters serving the TV and digital communities.

About Access Intelligence

Access Intelligence (www.accessintel.com), a portfolio company of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, is a b-to-b media and information company headquartered in Rockville, Md., serving four core verticals in Communications, Healthcare, Aerospace and Energy & Engineering. Market-leading shows include Satellite 2012, LDC Forums, Electric Power, Energy Ocean, OilComm and OR Manager tradeshows. Access Intelligence also produces executive conferences for the healthcare, PR, media, cable, energy and defense markets. Leading brands include CableFAX, Folio, Event Marketer, PR News, Defense Daily, Via Satellite, Rotor & Wing, AviationToday, Contexo Media, Dorland Health, Power and Chemical Engineering.

About Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS)

VSS (www.vss.com) is a private equity and mezzanine capital fund management company dedicated to investing in the information, education, media, communications and business services industries in North America and Europe. VSS provides capital for buyouts, recapitalizations, growth financings and strategic acquisitions to companies and management teams with a goal to build companies both organically and through a focused add-on acquisition program. To date, VSS equity and mezzanine funds have invested in 67 platform companies, which have in turn completed over 300 add-on acquisitions resulting in a portfolio with realized and unrealized enterprise values totaling over $14 billion.

FTC Contacts More CPA Affiliate Networks about Possible Actions

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-27

57

Performance Marketing Insider has learned that the FTC has alerted at least half-a-dozen networks that they are in the target for possible enforcement actions. These networks have received what are called “civil investigative demands” which have asked networks to provide information about their practices and specific affiliates they are doing business with.

According to insiders, the CIDs have been mainly sent to affiliate networks that were involved with Acai and Flog sites, and are mainly being used compile a list of possible companies to go after. It seems also that attorneys for the FTC have already made it clear with some of the networks, that they can chose to settle and sign an agreement immediately – or will face actions in the future.

With enforcement actions being very expensive and even leading to putting companies out of business, these actions are concerns to both the networks and the affiliates. Super-Affiliates including Tanner Vaughn and Ricardo Jose Labra faced actions and had their assets taken, when the FTC learned about their actions from CPA Networks in previous CID’s. One can assume that more affiliates will face possible actions for promoting offers in a deceptive manner, including using flogs.

Google Launching Competitor to Facebook Commenting Platform

By

Pesach Lattin

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2012-03-27

5

It seems, according to the Interwebs, that Google has decided to focus on copying everything that Facebook does. The most recent announcement seems to be that they are in the middle of planning a commenting platform to compete with Facebook comments.

There’s some obvious good things about this, mainly that this could easily be integrated into the Google+ but also be part of results. One of the huge problems with Facebook comments is that they are not index-able by search engines, including Google. This means when someone writes a Facebook comment, it wont show up in results or help with keywords or links.

What does this mean about third party systems? The NextWeb asked:

The question remains how this will affect services that are dedicated exclusively to providing a comment platform, like Disqus and Livefyre, who may struggle to compete against the likes of Facebook and Google down the line, each of wish enjoy a well-established user-base.

SlashGear had some thoughts about what would make Google comments better:

Each individual comment, meanwhile, could have its own unique URL – something suggested by CNET – which would allow for more precise linking as well as each comment to be its own, separately indexed search result. Given the popularity of Google search, and Facebook and Twitter’s reluctance to allow the company to include their content in results, it looks like Google is planning to simply bypass them altogether.

As a note, we don’t use Facebook’s commenting platform at PMi for the above reason. Without having them indexed, it seems that we are missing out on valuable SEO.

UrbanObserver

ADOTAT

How to Get More Traffic from YouTube

Mailers: California Spam Law Makes Hiding Illegal

ClickBooth Leaving DirectTrack for Cake Marketing

3 Tips to Leverage Pinterest for Marketing

Plenty of Fish Sued for Photo of Dead Soldier

Self-Serve Mobile Ads Available

Build Your Own Offer and Cross-Sell

Siri Sued by Angry Californian

Study: CPM Rates Do Not Equal Value

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