C-Level Executives Don’t Understand Performance Marketing

By

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2011-12-16

A recent IAB Affiliate Advertiser survey reveals that although more than three quarters of everyone who responded said their affiliate marketing spending had increased in the past, and nearly the same number expected their affiliate marketing spending to increase next year, more than half these same people said that knowledge of affiliate marketing at the CEO level is practically non-existent.

It seems strange to consider that a marketing tactic which is showing proven results, so much so that spending in this area – which is already high – and is expected to increase would pass mostly unnoticed by the head of the company.

This lack of knowledge at the CEO level is astounding, but not so uncommon. Often the head of a company sees only the big picture and not the minute details which helped paint that picture. They are more concerned with bottom line numbers, not so much with how those numbers got there, especially when the numbers as good.

As an affiliate marketer it is your job to not only produce results but make certain those results, and the efforts put forth to achieve them are recognized. This can be accomplished through the use of a detailed quarterly report delivered directly to the head of the company.

Affiliate marketing is performance marketing. That means unlike relationship marketing whose results are fluid and less definitive, you can produce real evidence for the work you are doing. There are hard and fast rules for effective affiliate marketing. There is no gray area in affiliate marketing. By its very nature it produces results or it doesn’t exist. These results can (and should) be tracked, recorded and delivered to the boss. This is the best way to keep her informed about what is happening; how the affiliate marketing work you are doing is producing real results and what efforts were undertaken to produce those results.

New Bill Threat to Online Marketers

By

Michael Marchese

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2011-12-15

7

Congress is at it, again. The House Judiciary Committee is currently meeting to decide what the next steps are for SOPA. As an affiliate marketer, if you are not familiar with this pending legislation, you should do so ASAP. The intention of the bill is meant to help enforce intellectual property protections on the Internet.

As it is written right now, there is a significant risk that affiliate marketers can be blind-sided and shutdown for carrying content on their websites that may be violating someone’s copyright. Theoretically, all it would take would be for an affiliate to unknowingly get copyright-infringing creative from an advertiser, as part of a campaign.
If you think this is far-fetched, here’s a quote from Wikipedia, citing some of the ways an affiliate could get hit, if they were perceived as violating a copyright: “Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.”

That’s right. Affiliates could instantly lose their search engine rankings, not get paid, and have their website blocked by their hosting provider.

Many Internet companies are adamantly speaking out against this atrocity-in-the-making. An open letter was sent to congress strongly protesting this legislation. The diversity of Internet companies that were signatories to the letter shows just how serious a threat this legislation is to the Internet and online marketers.

What is interesting is that many original content producers and companies associated with professionally-cited work were signatories, as well. Companies included The Huffington Post, Wikipedia, and Yahoo. Wikipedia is going so far as to threaten to “blank out” every page on their website.
If companies that create content are against the legislation, who benefits? That is the real question.

Details of the bill can be found here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261

Mommy Bloggers Gain Influence

By

Kathy Neudorf

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2011-12-15

8

It might seem old-fashioned but blogging is not to be overlooked as an effective affiliate marketing tool.

Facebook has more than 800 million users; Twitter and LinkedIn have more than 150 million each, but at last count, more than one billion people reportedly visit one or more blogs each month. In fact, as a demographic, moms are more likely to frequent blogs and make good use of the information they find there, than any other group.

Fleishman-Hillard and ModernMom.com recently surveyed more than 700 moms about their brand interaction and the results showed that blogs were their prime source of information. More than half of all moms who visit blogs reported the blog reviews they receive from other mommy bloggers are the most influential when it comes to the decisions they make about what brands they are going to buy.

Mommy bloggers, as a whole, wield more influence than Twitter or the variety of online communities devoted to reporting crucial information for other moms.

Brands trying to reach moms need to have a social presence, sure, but this should not be the end-all, be-all of their marketing tactics. With more than one billion people actively using blogs for their own consumer research purposes it seems likely you would have a much better chance of getting exposure for your product through a well-placed review at a popular blog.

Approaching a blogger for a product or site review is very simple. Every blogger worth contacting will have their email address in an obvious spot at their blog. Send them an introductory letter, offer them a sample of your product and ask that they write a review.

With the audience for blogs exceeding record levels, the time spent securing blog reviews is a valuable investment that just might score you the exposure and response you are looking for.

New Google Affiliate API Released

By

Michael Marchese

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2011-12-15

4

Google just released an API for its affiliate network program. Using the new API, both publishers and advertisers will be able to automate different, common tasks. The roll-out of these new capabilities should prove beneficial to both affiliates and advertisers.

Affiliate Benefits
With the API, publishers will be able to request a list of all advertisers. The catch is that the list will only contain advertisers that the publisher already has access to, as part of the program. Filters can be applied, based on earnings per click (EPC), EPC over the last 90 days, and more. The limiting factor is that the maximum number of advertisers that can be returned in a query is limited to 100. For affiliates that operate online storefronts or very large, portal websites, multiple queries may be required. Since the advertiser category is one of the filters available, this should not be a big deal.

Events data is also available, through the API. For affiliates that prefer to manage all of their earnings reporting, within their own internal reporting system, getting access to this data will prove invaluable. The granularity of event reporting data is impressive. Data can now be pulled all the way down to the SKU level, if part of the advertiser’s program. The API release should save Google affiliates a lot of administrative and reporting time, allowing them to redeploy resources back into revenue-generating activities.
Advertisers Gain Access

As part of the release, advertisers also gain API access. They will be able to perform many of the same queries that affiliates will be able to perform.
Further information on Google’s Network Affiliate API is available. This section will include technical and non-technical information. Affiliates that earn revenue through Google’s affiliate network should take a serious look at the new features and capabilities available. For more information on the announcement, please visit here.

MaxBounty Celebrates Eight Years

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-12-13

5

Despite the many challenges currently being faced in the pay-for-performance advertising industry, MaxBounty is excited to begin their ninth year of always providing on-time payments to their affiliates, the best CPA campaigns, and high-level support.

MaxBounty is eager to move forward in2012, continuing to be a leader in the performance-based marketing industry.

“Eight years is a great achievement in the very competitive field of performance marketing, particularly during a time when other established CPA networks are faltering. I think part of our longevity can be attributed to our commitment of service to affiliates, as well as our policy of non-competition with them. As a network, we don’t buy traffic from third parties, we don’t run mailing lists. That would put us in a conflict of interest with our affiliates, directly competing with them, so we don’t do it. It’s a trust thing. Of course, weekly payments and our $1000 bonus to new affiliates have also helped.” says JP Sauve, MaxBounty Inc.’s CEO.

MaxBounty has been among the top 20 performance marketing networks listed in mThink.com’s online poll, as voted on by affiliates, for Revenue Performance magazine (http://mthink.com/bluebook/top20). MaxBounty has been a trusted source of advertising since 2004 and continues to pay publishers on time, maintain a variety of pay-for-performance offers in order to accommodate the needs of virtually any publisher, and provide outstanding support from their team of affiliate managers.

Affiliates May Be Screwed by Marketplace Fairness

By

Michael Marchese

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2011-12-13

1

Recently, a bill was introduced in the senate called the “Marketplace Fairness Act”, or S.1832. At its most basic level, the bill would require most business, in all states to collect sales tax from “remote customers.” These remote customers are defined as customers that reside in a state, where the retailer does not have a substantial presence. In layman’s terms, it means that sales taxes need to be collected for every U.S. customer. If passed, the impact on the affiliate industry could be pronounced.

As of today, several, large companies with affiliate programs have dropped long-standing affiliates, who reside in states that have enacted more restrictive definitions of a “substantial presence” in their sales tax laws. Illinois is an example of one such state. The legislation that this state passed resulted in companies like Amazon dropping affiliates, based in Illinois, earlier this year. What happened in Illinois has not been the exception. Affiliates in state after state have lost significant revenue streams overnight, as a result of state legislation.

If the Marketplace Fairness Act manages to become law, the concept of sales-tax-haven states disappears. No longer would retailers need to drop their affiliates, as there would be no place to hide for sales tax collection.

Online retailers and their super affiliates could be impacted. When online retailers began to exclude affiliates, because of location, the hit to revenue that many smaller affiliates experienced was too great to overcome. A great number of these smaller affiliates shuttered their operations. The result was less competition for online media and within each retailer’s affiliate program.

Online retailers witnessed further concentration of their programs, with more dollars spent on fewer affiliates. For super-affiliates, the increased program concentration resulted in greater negotiating leverage. They could force online retailers to give them highly-preferential bounties. Retailers would have little choice but to provide such terms, for fear a large chunk of their affiliate-derived revenue would disappear with the click of a mouse.

If the Marketplace Fairness Act passes, retailers may be able to have more success in rebalancing and diversifying their affiliate distribution channel. For super affiliates, they may face rising online media prices, brought on by added competition. The question will be whether or not a substantial, small affiliate base remains to take advantage of the opportunity.

For those interested in learning more about this pending legislation and its status please click on the following link.

Sponsored by:
CPAWAY is the Fastest Growing CPA Network Ever.

Group Buying Sites will Die Out

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-12-13

25

You may have been left with the opinion, if you were fortunate enough to read my column, “How Groupon’s Value Is Based on Performance,” that I am a huge Groupon…well, Groupie. While I am a “member” of Groupon, I am far from a fan of the model. Since my last column sounded like a love-letter to Groupon, it seemed smart to look at the other side of the story and tie it into online marketing, and more importantly, what can be learned from three of Groupon’s shortcomings that could doom it to failure.

While companies like Groupon and LivingSocial have had huge growth and gained enormous value, they now appear to be stalling. According to Compete.com, Groupon.com went from an all-time high of 33 million unique visitors in June to 15 million in September. LivingSocial.com’s traffic decrease has matched Groupon similarly. And according to a Bloomberg report, Groupon owes almost twice as much to merchants at the end of September as it held in cash.

Those who say that Groupon is just a fad are partially right. While Groupon will likely continue to exist in some way, here are reasons it will eventually fade away as a footnote.

1. A limited number of companies will do business with Groupon more than once. Simply put, the model is really to some degree a one-shot deal. Providing discounts of your product over and over again through group buying doesn’t add up. A group-buying deal might bring new customers but there’s no guarantee those customers will return. Worse, many merchants are cutting into their profit margins on products and services they sell through these programs.

2. Flash sales work much better. When a company offers a serious discount, people use email, social media, and other methods to tell their friends about the offer. I don’t see Groupon offers on Facebook anymore, but I constantly see posts from my friends about one-day sales. Flash sales offered by merchants themselves work much better in gaining both buzz and long-term customers. More importantly, it builds brand recognition for the merchant.

3. Group-buying sites aren’t targeted. I don’t think I’ve seen an offer that really interests me on Groupon except once or twice. On a weekly basis I get tons of offers that have no interest to me whatsoever. As I get more and more offers that don’t interest me, I’m less and less interested in the group-buying site in general. Online advertising more and more is becoming about targeting. Groupon is starting to seem like spam.

What Groupon, LivingSocial, and other clones apparently did not account for is a key lesson of online advertising: know your audience.

In wanting to be extremely successful, the group-buying services expanded too fast and didn’t built target audiences. Whether you are a performance-based marketer or a brand marketer, you learn first and foremost to always understand your audience and to market to that audience.

It’s possible that Groupon, in particular, started out with a savvy, knowledgeable audience. But as it began to advertise, trying to get anyone and everyone to join, it lost any target. There are very few companies that can appeal to everyone. Because it is trying to market everything from half-off dentures to pole-dancing courses to the same audience, it is starting to see huge cracks in its business plan.

Ad Exchanges Will Kill Affiliates?

By

Michael Marchese

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2011-12-13

9

Ad exchanges are gaining significant traction in online advertising. Do they pose a real and present danger to affiliate marketers?

Ad Exchanges Defined

As Wikipedia defines them, “Ad exchanges are technology platforms that facilitate the bidded buying and selling of online media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks.”¹ The Rubicon Project and Pubmatic are examples of such exchanges. The marriage of comprehensive, online visitor tracking, real-time ad serving, and standardized ad formats, created the environment necessary for the development of ad exchanges.

Their growth rates are nothing short of phenomenal. According to Razorfish, ad exchanges are becoming the industry standard. They cite a report by IDC analyst Karsten Weide for supply side platform PubMatic that RTB systems in 2011 will be about $1.1 billion, with the number expected to double to $2 billion in the U.S. next year.²

Risk to Affiliates

In theory, ad exchanges are supposed to maximize the effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) for publishers and return on ad spend return (ROAS) for marketers. Without debating whether or not these exchanges do accomplish these goals, let’s assume that they will be able to do so in the future. The result may have a massive impact on affiliate marketers.

At the most basic level, traditional affiliate marketers bring expertise in media buying, advertising creative, and conversion optimization together. They are able to buy online media more effectively and better convert landing-page visitors into buyers.

If online ad exchanges are able to eliminate most of the inefficiencies associated with media buying, end customers gain the same media buying efficiencies affiliates currently enjoy. A key, affiliate advantage would end up being neutralized. For those affiliates, who have not developed a significant, visitor-to-buyer, conversion-rate advantage, there is a real risk that they could be run out of business. They do not need to be made extinct by the end customer. It could simply be from another affiliate that focused more on conversion optimization or ad creative.

When combined with the proliferation of website conversion optimization tools available, end customers may soon be able to significantly reduce the arbitrage advantage that many affiliate marketers currently enjoy, forcing the affiliates to evolve or die.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_exchange)
(Paid Content.org – November 9^th, 2011, Razorfish: Ad Exchanges Are Becoming The Industry Standard, by David Kaplan)

Sponsored by
Axon Media Group – Working with Axon is like Working with no Other CPA Network

CPALead & Peter Tarr Unlocks Revenue

By

Amy Capomaccio

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2011-12-12

14

We conclude our series of interview on Content Locking with the CEO of perhaps the most well-known of the content locking companies, CPALead. They have been in the industry the longest and are almost always refereed to in any conversation about the topic. Peter Tarr, the impending CEO ~~CEO~~ of CPALead joined recently this year, and takes over a company that is rumored to be one of the top sources of traffic for a dozen network and hundreds of advertisers. We sat down with Peter and asked him questions about the industry and more importantly, the future of the industry.

Can you tell me a bit about your professional background and how you first got started in this industry?

Sure, prior to joining CPAlead, I held an executive role with a competing incentive-based CPA firm where I was responsible for international business development. Before this, I held a managing position at Fortune 50 company Proctor & Gamble, where I oversaw employee activity and worked closely with high-profile clients to drive sales and develop future go-to-market strategies. I’m now the impending chief executive officer for CPAlead, where I’m responsible for the development and execution of strategic initiatives both globally and domestically.

CPAlead was founded in 2006. Tell me about how CPAlead came to be and how the business has grown over the years?

The idea for CPAlead’s flagship product, the Content Locker arose from our co-founders’ experience in the online virtual currency space. As video game lovers, they created this space in 2006 as a means to have advertisers pay for in-game rewards in exchange for the player’s interaction with the advertisement – but they also saw potential to shake up the online advertising industry.

They then created the Content Locker with the goal of providing a method for web publishers to easily earn money. This was a turning point in the industry as advertisers were selective as to where their budgets went, and we were a relatively new business model. If a user wants to view the content, all they have to do is interact with the widget – the publisher gets paid and the visitor gets to view the desired content without dealing with a paywall or subscription.

Today, CPAlead has a client base exceeding 150,000 and 23 employees. We were also named to this year’s Inc. 500 list as the 40^th fastest-growing private company in America, 6^th fastest growing online company and #1 online marketing & advertising firm.

Why should someone choose CPAlead as their CPA network? What can you offer that others can’t?

CPAlead provides the highest paying model available online, as our platform generates exponentially greater revenues than CPC, PPC or CPM models on a lead-to-lead basis. The advertisements we provide are highly tailored to your audience, so they really fit your content. We also run our business on trust and transparency, ensuring our publishers get paid for their content and providing them with a very individualized experience.

CPAlead founded the Virtual Currency model and created a new segment in the online marketing world. Can you explain exactly how this model works?

The model was conceived as a solution for online video gamers with limited financial resources. The solution allowed gamers to have advertisers pay for in-game rewards in exchange for the player’s interaction with advertisements. Streets-of-LA.com, the first online game to implement this technology, experienced a substantial revenue increase when the number of players utilizing our technology quickly and dramatically grew.

Our current offering, the Content Locker, is an evolution of monetizing content in the online virtual space, taking the idea of online virtual currency and applying it to a web publishing monetization platform.

What advantages does the Content Locker provide Publishers and Advertisers?

According to a Harris poll of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, 80 percent of respondents are not willing to pay to read a daily newspaper’s online content. This is certainly indicative of the larger trend that most people are unwilling to pay for other content whether it’s from online newspapers or other web publishers –the Content Locker provides an alternative for publishers that won’t make them compromise revenue or traffic.

CPAlead allows publishers to monetize content that may not otherwise drive revenue by providing a payment alternative for customers who do not want to spend money on content, thus abandoning a site at the point of sale. The advertisements are targeted to each individual site so that users are presented with ads (or offers) that are relevant to them so advertisers are essentially paying for the content in exchange for the user’s attention. With CPAlead, the web publisher, advertiser and consumer all win.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge in the entire incentivization industry?

Monetizing content without losing readers. Publishers need to find a way to be profitable, but also need to make sure customers don’t abandon the site when they come across a monetization solution such as an advertisement or payment tool.

Let’s talk strategy. What is CPAlead’s international strategy and where are you expecting the bulk of the growth to come from?

Given that we’re an online based company with a solution that can be applied globally, we’ve had the advantage of being able to cater to international clients from the get-go and have had some strong success. Now, with that said, we have put more of a focus on our domestic business since it is a bit easier to grow a company in an area where you’re familiar with business practices and where partners are an arm’s length away. However, we are focused on growing our relationships abroad – we believe that, for the immediate future, the key to being successful on an international stage is to build strong relationships with international partners such as advertisers and publishers.

What elements should advertisers and publishers be tracking and testing when running a campaign?

When it comes to campaign optimization, there are a few items to consider. First and foremost, you want to ensure that you are delivering relevant content to interested users. Once you feel as though you’re getting your campaign in front of the right people, you want to split test against other campaigns in your inventory. Regardless of what anyone says, marketing is never an exact science. What you and I think should be successful may not gain traction at all. Conversely, a campaign that seems poorly conceived may gain traction overnight and become wildly popular. If you look at Fortune 500 companies, you’ll see that a lot of them have strayed away from tradition. Take for example P&G, they have always been regarded as a conservative company when it came to marketing until the recent campaigns for Old Spice kicked off. It goes without say that someone must have thought there was no chance they would gain traction but the end result was an extremely successful campaign that has now become a piece of pop culture (the “This is your man” series). In the end, we can draw the conclusion that split testing one against the other is a necessity.

It says on CPAlead’s website that your mantra is trust and transparency. What strategies are put into place to ensure that online fraud is simply not an option?

We adhere to all industry rules and regulations and run our business with integrity. We allow publishers to only monetize ethical content – or rather content that they have the right to monetize. Our platform’s technology deters publishers from monetizing unethical content.

What are some of dangers you see as the online marketing industry continues to grow?

I think the biggest danger from a growth perspective is this continued love affair with complacency. Publishers, users and advertisers deserve more, yet don’t demand it. It’s counter intuitive but unfortunately true. The same old display methods and monetization solutions that existed at the inception of the internet are still dominant. Our platform takes the industry in a radically new direction and allows everyone involved to realize exponentially greater benefits.

From a security perspective, I think that the trend to further consolidate information is a good thing but also merits increased security measures. We’re already at the point where our mobile phones can store our entire lives – including our finances and while that allows us to have a single point for organizing our lives, it also creates a single target for others who have malicious intentions.

What are the 3 most pivotal moments in your career that you either learned from and/or that got you where you are?

The first would have to be the day I took my first professional job. I was working in finance doing analysis and stock trading. I think that relieved a lot of pressure from being a money-strapped student, and I had to make the decision whether I was satisfied simply to have something I could build on, or whether I really wanted to bear down and aspire for something greater. I learned a lot about myself and declared war against any sort of self-complacency.

The second would have to be when I left that career to take a management position with a Fortune 50 company. That was the day I put my beliefs on aspiring to put greater things into practice, and dramatically changed what I was involved in for the greater good of my career.

The third and perhaps most pivotal moment was shortly after I had left P&G where I was in a management position. I had just left the online firm I was working with and had been given an even greater opportunity to return to work with a Fortune 500 company in a position of authority – greater than what I had seen. This was the corporate dream offer, so to speak, and I had to decide whether I wanted to undertake that position or take a risk and go after something where I believed in a smaller company and saw a greater future for myself and that company. As it turns out, I chose to go with the latter and here I am at CPAlead, where I still believe the future will only get brighter and brighter. I think the lesson learned was that, while you need to do your homework, you need to – above all else – believe in yourself. Believe in your ability to have an impact and if you think that there is a good opportunity – you have to believe that you yourself can make it into something even greater. I think all too often we’re concerned with what a company already is – which is why Fortune 500 positions are the dream. If you’re in a company that is already established, you feel as though there is less pressure on you to make a difference since you won’t have as great an impact on the bottom line. However, if you take that challenge, believe in yourself and deliver – the rewards are exponentially greater in my opinion.

Any words of wisdom for someone who looking to get into this industry?

Absolutely – try to understand where you can deliver value and believe in yourself. It’s not always about getting to the highest point on the corporate ladder, but rather the right point for you. If you’re the best at what you do, you’re going to be successful, period. So figure out where your strengths are and deliver value.

If you had a money tree in your back yard and could purchase anything for your business tomorrow, what would it be?

Great question. I think I’ll take the lighter side of this question and say a top notch health and exercise facility. We’re really big on promoting healthy living at the office – it’s a big part of our culture and we’re always looking for ways to help facilitate. It isn’t all about coming into the office and working – how healthy you are impacts not only your ability to work but your ability to live well. I’m pretty heavy into fitness and wellness, so I would love to purchase a state-of-the-art facility for our group here.

6 Keys To Better Email Newsletter Open Rates

By

Chris R. Keller

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2011-12-11

12

1. Use a person’s name in the from line as opposed to a companies

By using a person’s name instead of a company’s name or generic name like “sales” in the from line you should expect 25%-35% better results. People want to deal with people so it makes sense that email recipients will be more likely to open an email from a person instead of one that is not coming (or at least appear to be coming) from a real person. By including a person’s name in the from line you there is also a chance that the recipient may confuse the name shown, for someone else they know, increasing your open rate. There will also be a small portion of people that will open the email simply because they are curious to find out who the person is that just emailed them. Once you get the recipient to open the email anything can happen.

2. Use a subject line that is shorter rather than longer

Using a subject line that is 35 characters or less will greatly increase your open rates. People sending real emails rarely write really long subject lines, so having a really long subject line will often trigger thoughts of spam for the recipient. As with all aspects of email marketing it is a good idea to test multiple subject lines to see which ones get the best results. If you are continually testing new subject lines you will develop a wealth of knowledge of what words and phrases generate good open rates for your email list.

3. Place your greatest hook within the top 3 lines

A large portion of people today utilize some form of a preview pane. As a result, if your email does not capture their attention within the first few lines, your email will be deleted instead of read. To combat this it is critical to include the information, that is most likely going to get the recipient to open your email, within the top 3 lines of your email. This will ensure it is visible in the preview pane. If you do this, you will see higher open rate results.

4. Send early in the morning

Various studies indicate that the best time to send email marketing messages is sometime between 5:00 am and 8:45 am. My own testing also validates that sending emails early in the morning is the best time to send to get the best results. In my testing the optimal time is between 8:15 and 8:45 but this may be a result of the composition of the recipients on my email lists. All of the email marketing I do is for business to business purposes. Business to consumer email marketing may follow a different pattern. Different markets within the business to business realm may also have different optimal send times. The best thing to do is to test different send times to see what results in the best performance for your particular list.

5. Find your optimal day to send

Finding the day of send that will result in the best results for your particular mailing list usually results in a 25%-100% increase in results. That means if you are currently making $2,000 in sales from every marketing email you send out, finding the optimal day to send would increase your revenues by $2,000 to $4,000 per email. That could accumulate to a very large number if you send out a lot of emails every year. Lets say you send out only 12 emails a year, that could be $24,000 in sales you are missing out on. If you send out weekly emails that would be $104,000 in annual revenue. You get the idea. To find your optimal day simply send an email that is exactly the same (same from title, subject line content, etc) at the exact the same time on two different days. Take a look at the results and see which day performed better, then take the best day of the two and test that day versus another day of the week.

6. Have a marketing plan

Probably the biggest single factor to getting good open rates is to be sending your marketing emails to the right people that will be interested in what you are providing. Without a marketing plan that outlines what your positioning is, what your points of difference are versus your competition and who you will target to sell to, it will be very hard to determine the right people to get onto your email list. If you do not have a marketing plan this is where you should start before doing any email marketing as you will be spending time in a manner that is not very productive. If you don’t know how to create a marketing plan do not worry as there are many great free marketing plan templates available on the internet. Here is a link to a great free marketing plan template.

Study Shows Everyone Loves Social Media

By

Kathy Neudorf

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2011-12-09

9

Market researchers StrongMail recently reported the results of a marketing survey which shows that 92 percent of businesses contacted indicated that they plan to increase or at least not decrease their marketing spending in 2012.

Given the economy is showing some signs of life after a few dark years, this might not come as a complete surprise to many. However, of the companies that plan to increase their spending of marketing dollars a full 60 percent say their increased spending will be for email marketing, and 55 percent said the increased spending will go toward social media marketing.

It is now possible to reach more than one billion people using just three social media networks, namely Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, there is simply no reason to wait for the opportunities to improve. In fact, never before have marketers been able to reach a larger audience with just a few simple tools.

Even a 30 second Super Bowl commercial, the most valuable televised airtime available, doesn’t reach even half that number of eyeballs. By comparison a well-written Facebook ad, well placed, can reach ten times that many people at a much lower cost.

Email marketing as well stands a much better chance at targeting the specific demographic you are aiming for without the hit-or-miss of a television commercial.

The fact that social media marketing is now within reach of nearly anyone with a brand, product or service to sell it stands to reason that more and more companies are looking to capitalize on this reach.

Research has shown that the trend toward more social media marketing will likely continue as the networks expand their reach and more companies grow accustomed to the new paradigm. So far many companies (remember, only half said they were looking to increase the use of social media marketing, which means the other half is not) are still too unsure of how to use social media marketing to get their message out; too afraid of what the use of social media might mean for their systems, their secrets; or how to mitigate the risks often associated with the use of social media marketing to take full advantage of it.

As more companies come to accept social media marketing as the new way to do business in the 21st Century, many others will be looking to capitalize on the next frontier in social media; mobile. Companies that understand social media marketing today will surely be in a better position to integrate mobile marketing strategies into their marketing plans tomorrow.

Stumbleupon Gets a New Look

By

Kathy Neudorf

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2011-12-09

5

Stumbleupon is making a play for more users by revamping its color scheme, debuting a new logo, a new “Channels” feature and improving the effectiveness of its stumble feature by adding a new “Stumblebar,” the crux of its business model.

Stumbleupon was an early leader in the area of web content flagging social media services. It allowed users to earmark certain web pages for other users to note. This was a different take on social media that proved popular with regular blog readers and people who spent more time reading on the Internet than playing virtual games.
Last summer Stumbleupon debuted a new feature, the “Explore Box” which allowed users to find specific content by doing a simple keyword search. Prior to that they could only search for a general interest topic, not a specific theme. The “Explore Box” proved very popular and new users began flocking to the site. This spurred Stumbleupon to continue innovating and improving their site, leading to the most recent changes.

The “Stumblebar” lets users more easily share the content they enjoy most with their friends via email, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Sharing is the basis of Stumbleupon, it is what brings users around to the site in the first place, so anything which facilitates sharing is likely to be a welcome feature.

Stumbleupon did not use a complicated algorithm to determine what improvements to make, they just listened to their existing users and responded. In today’s quickly changing social media world where changes come and go based on what often looks like a random decision or one obviously meant to increase revenue in a specific area, responding to user requests seems like a radical idea.
But it worked for Stumbleupon. The site recently eclipsed 20 million active users and has been climbing steadily. The new look is brighter, the new logo is more exciting and the entire site is more visually oriented than it was before, focusing on a broad range of popular search topics, like music, movies and humor.

Not everything is wholly original, however. Their new Stumbleupon “Channels” look very much like Facebook Pages in that they allow businesses or individuals to create brand specific sites within Stumbleupon that promote their featured or original content. But given the success of Facebook Pages it is no wonder others are mimicking the feature. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all.

It was not so long ago that many people were predicting the imminent demise of content sharing web sites, chief among them, Stumbleupon. But this recent slate of changes has proven vastly more successful than anyone might have predicted, thus proving once again that what we think we can expect from the future of social media is nothing compared with what we will actually get.

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New Changes at Virgin America

By

Kathy Neudorf

-

2011-12-08

2

In an effort to mitigate the difficulties involved in switching to a new online reservation system, Virgin America has been making good use of social media. In fact, they have sent out more than 11,000 direct messages via Twitter to customers upset about problems encountered during the transition.

Prior to the switch they sent out emails to fliers, over staffed their customer service department first by 35 percent then by 45 percent and thinned their flight schedule. They have also been monitoring the social media networks for complaints (hence the 11,000 DM via Twitter) of which there have been many.

Unfortunately, despite all this preparation, monitoring and management, Virgin America has found itself on the receiving end of an outpouring of ill-will from its tech-savvy customers who cannot seem to grasp why they are suddenly experiencing so many difficulties from the airline which is known for having re-invented air travel.

The fact is the reservation system change-over is a once in a lifetime event for an airline and no small thing. It represents a major change in the way Virgin America reservations are conducted online. The new system, called Sabre, is the industry-standard for travel reservations network. It started in the 1960’s and has seen numerous evolutions, some better than others. The Virgin America migration is hardly an earth-shattering move, or a signal that the airline is giving up on its philosophy of originality and joining the “good ol’ boys” network. Just the opposite.

Virgin America hopes the new system will represent a smoother overall experience for fliers once all the bugs have been worked out. The difficulty lies not in the end result they are hoping for but in getting from here to there without being abandoned by the very loyal customers they are hoping to improve service for. So far results have been mostly negative as angry fliers have taken to the social media landscape to complain fervently about the problems they are having with the new reservation system. As compensation the airline is waiving change and cancellation fees for passengers who experience trouble and some members of the airline’s frequent flier program who traveled during the switch-over and experienced problems received an email apology from the airline’s CEO and 5,000 bonus points.

How much the switch has hurt their business is still unknown, and still too early to tell. In the end it seems likely customers will find the things they love about Virgin America – Wi-Fi on all flights, power outlets at every seat and more leg room – far outweigh the inconvenience they experienced while the new reservation system came online.

Axon, Axoff. Work with Axon

MaxBounty: CPA Network Review.

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2011-12-08

2

MaxBounty is one of the most recognized CPA networks in the industry. Founded in 2004 with the ideology of ‘paying affiliates more’, MaxBounty has become a premier resource for affiliates seeking to draw advertising revenue from their websites, e-mail lists and SEO/SEM efforts by providing them with hundreds of quality CPA campaigns. Our large base of top-notch affiliates and unparalleled support has made us the first choice for advertisers looking to increase their customer base through pay-for-performance lead acquisition. Now offering WEEKLY payments and a $1000 bonus to new affiliates!

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MaxBounty: CPA Network Review.

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