Ok so I’ll admit the title was a blatant act of sensationalism.  Sorry about that.  But when I read about Amazon’s entry into the tablet market, the Kindle Fire, I had sudden visions of the chess club champion sucker punching the quarterback of the football team.  Is Google the quarterback in that analogy?  Of course it is.

For months now Google and Facebook have fired shots across each others’ bow.  Countless industry experts and amateur enthusiasts have speculated on whether Google + will take down Facebook in the end.  All the talk really amounts to little though if Amazon succeeds in making their tablet name eponymous with the most frequent and essential social, commercial, and search aspects of Internet usage.  Someday you may say “I Fired it” rather than “I Googled it” or “Check out our Fire page.”

How could a simple tablet unseat an Internet audience powerhouse such as Google or Facebook?  It’s simple the way I see it.  When you look at it in the most elemental way, people use the Internet each day just as they do most other repetitive things, habitually.  If you look at the habits behind using Google and Facebook they are no less anchored than the toothbrush you use or the car you drive.  Temporary and flimsy consumer loyalty is what I’m getting at.  So what does this all have to do with Amazon’s tablet?  If Amazon is really going to sell it for $199 then you can begin with price.  Look no further than cell phone companies to find evidence of how audiences can be built on the back of a free or discounted piece of hardware.  Of course it doesn’t end there.  A comparison of the features of the Kindle Fire beside the Apple iPad and others in the tablet marketplace will reveal that Amazon has serious intentions to compete with Apple’s tablet.  Affiliates may be wondering what any of this has to do with performance marketing.  Patience, I’m getting there.

Here’s where this gets complicated for current-day 800 lb gorillas Google and Facebook.  Behind the Kindle Fire is Amazon’s cloud computing powerhouse that will do a lot in the way of revealing user preferences, buying habits, etc.  And when you couple all the data storage and inherent targeting capabilities Amazon will have with the social aspects of many users on a common mobile Internet device you start to see that it would be simple for Amazon to make it easier for users of their tablets to also use their social, search, and commerce applications.  Control the entry point to the Internet and control the user experience.  Google has tried to do the same thing without much success and Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction.  But the Internet is a very unforgiving place oftentimes when you are the 2nd or 3rd company to adapt to an opportunity to grab a large chunk of an available audience away from the reining champion.  Remember MSN, Yahoo, and MySpace?

Now if you’re still wondering what this has to do with your daily media buy or other aspects of your life as an Internet marketing wizard consider this last question.  What will a company that has already shown a relative lack of concern for performance marketing partners such as affiliates in California do when it has even more power over the Internet users that you are attempting to get your advertisements in front of?  I’ll give you a hint.  You are the quarterback and the chess club champ is behind you with a big grin on his face.

LeadClickMedia, a CoreLogic company, has reportedly shut their doors. Calls to their office were unreturned, and no one picked up the operator extension. According to employees of the company, the company announced today that they were closing and immediately laid off almost all employees without notice.

Several current employees when asked confirmed that the company was completely shut down and would no longer in business. According to insiders, over 50 employees were handed pink slips today. This does not come unsurprised, as earlier this year some of the more senior employees were let go as part of cost cutting measures.

In 2005 LeadClick media was acquired by First Advantage, paying approximately $150 for a majority stake in the company.

The closing of the company is rumored to be related to both the dwindling company revenues plus a recent expensive class action lawsuit that resulted in what potentially could be a multi-million dollar class-action settlement.

Google has announced that they will be adding +1 buttons to all the ads in their display network. Similar to the “Like” button on Facebook, ads will feature a +1 button on the bottom of all ads, and footnotes about those who also +1’d the advertisement. This will last for about 10 seconds, then fade away.

According to a Google Spokesperson,

When an ad is personally annotated, there’s a positive impact on click-through rate. You get this great win of users becoming advocates for your product… you can take advantage of social and you don’t need to come up with new metrics. All of this is baked into all of your existing ad campaigns.

These ads could be highly effective for performance marketers who are using the Google Plus network to promote new products and connect with users through that platform. It will allow you to +1 your own ads and in theory, create more attention to those who have connected with your product profile. While Google Plus doesn’t currently have pages for small businesses, they are planning on changing that pretty fast. Still, users could create profiles that represent people “within” the business they are promoting and then connect to users via that method.

Additionally, +1 adds should help create better targeting, because those who really “like” ads should in theory want more of them.

Thoughts?

New Security Offer

Over the last few years, we’ve heard all the talk about display advertising, real time bidding platform, demand side platforms, exchanges, you name it. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft have all bought companies with solutions, and they have all pushed that these methods will open inventory to almost anyone to buy and bid on advertising. Still, despite this, display advertising is still barely used by the average performance marketer or affiliates – most networks, most exchanges and most bidding platforms are not accessible to buyers.

Most advertising networks do have some performance marketing division: usually taking campaigns from CPA networks, throwing them up, doing almost nothing to really optimize it. They use the campaigns to fill their inventory, raise their eCPMs. Many of them have contacts with major media buyers at performance marketing agencies, who buy some of their inventory. Along with that, some “super-affiliates” and “flog-sites” buy inventory in large amounts. However, the average affiliate has no way to access this inventory.

The reasons are simple: the price point is usually to high to start, and there is no easy way to access the inventory.

Even though there are tons of exchange platforms and now RightMedia feeds into DoubleClick Exchange, which feeds into a dozen other platforms, most affiliates can’t access this inventory. The average campaign price is $5,000 often, and because of still poor optimization abilities on the platforms, this will often be spent overnight on just a few sites. Any normal performance marketing company, that wants to perhaps test 10 products, $500 per product, per channel, finds that it is almost impossible to do so.

For whatever reason, exchanges and networks still ask buyers to spend way too much money to buy significant inventory. While there are more than a few companies that offer site-by-site buying, it’s often too tedious for people to test different creatives, different products. Just look at AdBrite, which recently somehow changed into an “exchange” without changing the technology or the content. It’s still a cumbersome process to access sites, upload creatives and try to somehow optimize.

Networks need to look at the Facebook model, which allows people to upload ads, test different targets easily, and frankly pay really low CPM per advertisement. People can test $50 for one advertisement, with a really narrow target, see results immediately. Networks on the other hand usually have no self-serve platform, no ability to test narrow targets especially with lower budgets.

Networks claim its too cumbersome,  but that sounds like excuses to try to bilk agencies out of money to reach “long tail” sites and to have greater reach. It’s easier for them to tell agencies that they need to spend $100k per channel, per advertiser, than actually create or use a system that will allow anyone to access the inventory easily and then optimize easier.

With the current economic situation however, display networks are seeing agency money dry up and more and more display advertising going to places like Facebook. Even though the average media buyer in agencies love wasting money, there are enough savvy media buyers that demand change.

Display advertising MUST change, must adapt and become easily accessible to everyone.
Whoever creates a system that allows access to anyone to all inventory, from Facebook to RightMedia, to buy inventory and optimize it on the fly, will rule the display market and have a tool that anyone would want t o buy on.

If you are one of those people using Article marketing as a method of promoting your content, you should have already read some of my articles on good content versus spam content. Similarly, you should be listening to my friend Matt Cutts, the Grandmaster of GoogleSpam, the Count of Quality.

He’s the guy who makes sure that crap doesn’t end up on Google, and more importantly that people don’t create junk content. One of the best ways to ensure that your content is listed by Google is the new REL=Author Tag. If you don’t know about this, this is a great way to start.

Article marketing is great for backlinks and general marketing, but only if its unique content. Unfortunately as part of many blackhat marketers methods, they will steal existing content. While Google has become better and better at finding what the original content is, this technique can often create issues for the person who made the original content.

The result is often having your content delisted or not counting for your backlinks.

Thus, Matt Cutts is recommending that you use the REL=Author method of verifying content as your originally and getting listed by Google using that method.

To do this, you need to use two methods to get “attention” from Google and more importantly, to verify what article are yours.

The first method is using the REL=ME method, which is highly recommended in linking profiles from your blog to your profile on Google. While this is not currently completely supported, the upcoming function will help in Google searches on your name, and help verify which information is verified, more important than spam and more interesting to potential readers.

If you haven’t you need to setup a Google Plus Profile, similar to mine at Pace Lattin

Then you’ll want to link from your profile page on your blog and other sites (About me pages) to that profile using the REL=ME link.

The code is simple, should look like:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/108061065454579782550” REL=”ME”>Pace Lattin</a>

You want to put this in as many places, blogs, article marketing sites on the “BIO” section of the site, especially if there are separate pages like that.

The second step is just as simple. You’ll want to put REL=”AUTHOR” on posts that you have written. Currently there is no easy way to insert this into WordPress, for example, so I’d recommend just having it inserted into all the pages of your blog. For Guest bloggers, this will be an issue, since there is no easy way to feature this except to put in in your bio hardcoded. I’m hoping someone will make a google profile plugin for wordpress.

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/108061065454579782550” REL=”AUTHOR”>Pace Lattin</a>

Why is Google Plus Rel and Author Tags Important?

From talking to people over at Google, many of the features are in development. However basically the main issues right now are:

Better Verified Authority = This allows people to know exactly who did this, and when it shows up in Google gives you a bit of promotion.

Preventing People from Stealing your Content = If someone steals at a later date, Google will know its scraped crap.

Better Rankings = This is the huge thing that I love. According to Matt Cutts, when Google+ is fully integrated into Google, it will allow people to get better rankings based on what is on Google+. As mentioned, for Google-ing your own name, will allow people to get results that are more appropriate to start.

We don’t know all that Google+ will do for you, but one of the best techniques will be better search results and amazing opportunities for affiliate marketers.

Here’s a little about this feature from Matt Cutts himself. Enjoy the video.

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If you haven’t already heard, my friend Mike Pacheo, aka “Affiliate King” is holding a kick ass meetup in Puerto Rico for about anyone who would like to attend. Yes, you heard that right, unlike some meetups, this is an open event that will cost absolutely nothing to attend. Also, unlike some of the “events” being promoted by the gurus out there, it also will contain loads of free advice for affiliates as you network with other affiliates in the space.

Here is part of the event schedule

• 7:30am: Start boarding outside of Ritz Carlton for Catamaran
• 8:00am: Leave for Catamaran
• 9:00am: Check In at Catamaran
• 10:00am: Departure
• 11:00am: Arriving at (Icacos, Palominito, Lobos, Tortugas o Palomino)
• 12:00pm: Lunch
• 1:00pm: Departure from (Icacos, Palominito, Lobos, Tortugas o Palomino)
• 2:30pm: Sailing to Villa Marina
• 3:30pm: Arriving at Villa Marina
• 4:30pm: Back at Ritz Carlton
• 6:00pm: Board for La Rumba Dinner Cruise (sails around the Bay of San Juan)
• 6:30pm – 9:30pm: Entertainment, dinner and open bar.

As mentioned, the best part of this is that its completely free and all you need to do is book your own tickets and reserve a hotel. Oh, yes, as for the hotels Mike has secured a dealwith Ritz Carlton Hotel in San Juan for the dates, so can get a servere discount.

Did I mention, that if you RSVP you are also signing up for the possibility of getting the trip absolutely free?

I highly recommend that you consider taking this trip, especially if you are looking for the opportunity to dunk Mike off the boat and leave him in Puerto Rico.

As we previous mentioned, ClickBank has been under enormous pressure by the FTC (Read Clickbank FTC) to make changes its program after numerous customer complaints and a rising chargeback issue with Internet Marketing programs. As part of that, they have started to make additional changes to the guidelines, some which are being announced this week as part of a expanding push to control JV marketer’s messages.

According to their own blog, ClickBank will no longer approve new JV and Internet Marketing programs that do not follow very strict rules, that they feel will prevent more FTC inquiries and consumer complaints.  Additionally, all current landing pages must be immediately changed or programs will be removed from ClickBank.

The changes that ClickBank Requires are as follows:

–          Customers must know what to expect while purchasing a product.
–          Must contain clear, detailed information about the product even in the pitch pages.
–          All software must list specifically what the software does. For example, “This software helps you find new keywords.”
–          No more general pitches allowed that make claims how easy the product is to use.

Of course, many of the IM Gurus are “up in arms” about these changes, claiming that they will ruin their current method of selling products through JV programs and they will no longer make money. Several of them have brought up the point that these guidelines are stricter than what is required from offline products and that ClickBank is over responding to criticism. They also believe that many IM products will just leave ClickBank and move to other processors and that because of that consumers will lose the guaranteed refund policy of ClickBank.

Still, a large amount of the industry believes these changes are positive. As Nick J. West said in Performance Marketing Insider, “These types of ‘JV’ and ‘information services’ scams have been running for years, with a big majority of them knowingly walking consumers down the path of misinformation and out of their hard-earned money. I am glad the FTC is clarifying their position on this issue, too bad the FTC virtually has no teeth when it comes to early enforcement actions against the biggest abuse.”

What are your thoughts?

As you may know, just a few months ago, CA Governor Brown signed into a law an affiliate tax that had taxed purchases by any company with California affiliates. The immediate result had been the removal of tons of affiliates from companies like Amazon.com. However, according to the Performance Marketing Association, Governor Brown has signed legislation that will repeal this law for the period of one year.

The Performance Marketing  Association’s Executive Director, Rebecca Madigan stated, “The signing of this legislation means these 25,000 web-based entrepreneurs will be able to get back in business. For the PMA, this issue has always been about keeping the vibrant Affiliate Marketing sector of the economy strong and growing.”

However, as Kevin Wallach has pointed out in his article about this subject, Amazon Takes Deal Screws Affils this isn’t really much of a deal, since this is only a yearly deal and really doesn’t provide any incentives for companies to continue working in California. In fact, if you read Kevin’s article he makes a very good point that this is just a law to help protect Amazon and as part of their original deal, they dropped their bid to repeal the law completely. What does this mean? In a year the affiliate tax will be back in place, and we’ll be no closer to helping California Affiliates.

Perhaps you are one of the many people bitching about the Facebook layout changes. Personally, I don’t care if Facebook changes into the ugliest site on the internet, just as long as it provides opportunities to marketers to make more money. Lo, the changes being made are actually going to make more money for everyone who wants to market.

Facebook plans to add a “Want” button, which will allow people to alert other people about products or services they intend to buy. The possibility for marketers is endless, because this will allow you to promote products to your crowd, and more importantly try to get other people to “want” products to their friends.

On top of that, the new buttons will allow more and more ability to target. This is a goldmine for affiliate marketers, because if a person wants a specific type of product, they are more likely to buy another product.

Additional buttons that will allow more targeted will be “read”,”listened or “watched” which will allow advertisers to gain immediate feedback on the success or failure of certain product pushes but more importantly create instant buzz.

What do I “want?” More opportunities for Affiliates on Facebook.

While the US Courts have ruled that bidding on a competitor’s trademark does not violate their trademark, it seems that the European Courts have taken a completely different stance that could affect affiliates attempting to break into the European market.

In a judgement in a case, between Inflora and Marks&Spencer, ruled by  the EC (European Court), the court ruled that the use of a competitor’s trademark as a search keyword might actually adversely affect a trademark as it could in fact interfere with a brands reputation and its ability to retain customers.

The court however did say that the practice would be allowed when the advertisement shown, “puts forward an alternative to the goods or services of the proprietor of the trade mark with a reputation – without offering a mere imitation of the goods or services of the proprietor of that trade mark, without causing dilution of the trade mark or detriment to its repute (tarnishment) and without, moreover, adversely affecting the functions of the trade mark.”

This of course does not affect US trademark bidding practices, since the a California Appeals Court ruled in March 2011, that buying ads on a competitor’s name isn’t a violation of trademark law.

Simply put there is no faster, more feature-rich, more user-friendly affiliate tracking program in the marketplace. Built using state of the art technology with our clients and their needs in mind, the HitPath® performance marketing tracking software is both flexible and scalable yet uncompromisingly reliable and accurate.

It goes without saying that accurate and reliable tracking is the key to maintaining a successful affiliate marketing network. But that is not the only reason why HitPath stands apart from other tracking applications. Custom reporting, defined control over administration roles and easy to use third party pixel and creative asset management consoles are just a few of the additional feature benefits that differentiate the HitPath platform.

Wednesday saw the debut of OfferMatch, the first pay-for-performance marketing channel from Offermatic. Offermatic is a startup company that delivers targeted offers to consumers based on the purchase history of their members in an effort to bring “guarenteed new and profitable customers to any offline merchant.” The offers are based on the actual purchase history of Offermatic’s customers and with OfferMatch, they’re giving merchants the ability to send offers to potential customers. Most importantly, these offers are based on the predicted lifetime value (LTV) of these attainable consumers.

All offers are private and matched to customer quality based on their predicted LTV, making it easier for merchants by showing them how to turn new customers into frequent, loyal customers.

“This is the future of marketing,” says Offermatic founder and CEO Faisal Qureshi, “A customer who is worth $500 should receive a better offer than one worth $50.”

In addtion to being able to establish a new, long-time customer base, OfferMatch gives merchants the ability to optimize a customer’s LTV after an acquisition by targeting retention offers to customers who may be lapsed or inactive with that particular company, but are still shopping in the same category with different merchants.

There is no integration or implementation necessary for merchants to start using Offermatic.

So far, in its brief existence, Offermatic members have already received offers from the likes of Kmart, Subway, Sports Authority, Nordstrom, Fandango, Drugstore.com, Amazon and more.

Cake Marketing is a hosted software solution that provides an all-inclusive suite of management services for online marketing campaigns. From tracking and reporting to lead distribution, our software enables advertisers, publishers and lead generators a fully scalable and accurate platform developed with a combination of innovative technology and an imaginative approach to doing business online.

We’re changing the way advertisers and affiliates manage online campaigns by providing a searchable platform with easy-to-use wizards and tools to maximize results. By having actual affiliate marketers design, develop and test our services, we’ve created a scalable, feature-rich product customized to meet your needs. Manage and control campaigns at every level: Cake makes loading, editing, optimizing and managing campaigns simple but with an emphasis on productivity and accuracy. The result? Optimal campaigns that sell.

Just to ensure everyone is clear, “CPA Approval Services” are completely ran and operated by fly by night fraud rings. If you do a few searches on Google you will find countless posts for people offering their “services” and “affiliates” looking for such help.

“Pay x amount of dollars for each account approved.”

 “I will create a website optimized for CPA approval.”

 “I can fill out CPA applications and do the phone calls to the networks for you or you can do them yourself and I will tell you what to say.”

I understand there are some newbies who feel the need to get assistance getting into a network, and at times some major networks might be a bit short with them. Turning to professional fraudsters is not the answer. A majority of “affiliates” who enlist these services are planning to run fraudulent traffic themselves. The sheer amount of services offered just further demonstrates the rising number of individuals who profit, at the affiliate and network’s expense. As with any business, it has to be successful for sub services to start popping up. Just think about all those nifty after market 3rd party Apple Gadgets you have.

  Sites like Freelancer.com allow projects such as these to be posted without any restrictions (even though their code of conduct states fraud is unacceptable). I signed up for an account for the sole purpose of reporting these violations, of course no action has been taken. Most affiliate forums will ban you for posting or requesting services such as these. As an affiliate manager at GetAds who handles fraud first hand regularly, it is becoming easier to spot these services and deny such applications to our network.

It is extremely frustrating to see these projects post weekly and actual affiliates who don’t mind aiding these fraudsters. To give you an example, the latest posting on Freelancer, whose project creator is from China, looks like this;

“Hi guys,
I need someone who can help me get approved by some CPA network.
You must have experienced with CPA networks and know how to promote the offer with all kinds of methods.
I need the following networks account approved.

 (He lists over 10 major networks)

 You should have the experience about CPA approval.
You will do the application and make phone calls or connect the affiliate managers via AIM.
You can use any method just make sure you can get approved.
You will get paid if the application is approved.
Check account success through,I will pay $30-$80 per account approval.

If you are good at CPA approval, Please PM me the details (your experience, which CPA network accounts you have, your contact information etc.,)
I’m looking for people who can have long-term cooperation with me!
If you have any accounts want to sell than you can PM me too.”

This post was bid on by someone in the US who mentioned they are “doing this professionally…” As an industry, something needs to be done.

Don’t expect someone to do the work for you! I had an honest affiliate who used Freelancer to help him attain leads on an offer and was distraught to find that his marketing expert from Pakistan was placing leads. He ended up losing quite a bit of money and there was nothing I could do to help. If these “experts” truly knew how to run quality traffic, don’t you think they would do it themselves and cut you out of the equation? Take the time and do your research. Everyone is always searching for the easy way out but as the saying goes, “if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself!”

If you are concerned about getting into a network, the most important thing is to be yourself! Be honest about everything, where you are at with your affiliate marketing and you should have no problem. Most networks don’t require that you have websites. So, if you have an established site, that’s great. If not, don’t worry about it and certainly don’t make a crappy site just to have one (that’s more obvious). The network wants to talk to you, not someone pretending to be you. If you can’t manage to get your own real accounts…how can you expect to make real money?