As of November 1st, all CPA offers listed in Offers202 are supplied exclusively by Offervault. In addition to supplying offer data for searches directly on the Offers202 site, Offervault now feeds all sites dependant on the Offers202 feed including Affbuzz and Affilatepaying.

New York, NY (PRWEB) November 16, 2010

Offervault, the original and premier aggregator of CPA offer data from over 100 leading CPA networks, has solidified its leading position in the industry with this important partnership with Tracking202. The partnership provides Offervault listed networks with substantial additional distribution and exposure for their offers, with reach to Offers202 users and to the network of additional sites that Offers202 feeds via its real time data feed. Offervault data will soon be available to Prosper202 users as well when the next major update is released.

Networks wishing to be included in Offers202 must now be listed first in Offervault. Offervault will automatically feed the data to the additional sites.

“This has been in the works for a few months and we are very excited to have finalized this important partnership between our companies” said Mark Roth, founder of Offervault. Wes Mahler and I have served the same user base for the past several years so it is great to be working closely together on this partnership, he said. Roth stated that he is particularly excited to provide the new distribution to Offervault listed networks.

President of Tracking202, Nana Gilbert-Baffoe says “We feel that our users will benefit from this new agreement, because Offervault is fully dedicated to running and maintaining the most comprehensive offer search engine in the market. This will allow us to focus on our core competency of building exceptional tracking software for affiliates.”

Offervault, founded in July 2007 as the first aggregator of CPA offers has since grown to become the premier aggregator and hub for CPA networks and affiliates with over 100 networks, 30,000 offers and 40,000 registered members.

Offervault is free for affiliates and publishers. It enables them to quickly find top offers and compare payouts between networks. It also saves hours of time by helping publishers research niches, browse new offers that are updated daily, preview landing pages, receive optional email alerts for new offers based on their criteria and to sign up for new networks.

Offervault provides additional features including instant keyword and demographic data for each offer and weekly training webinars covering a vast array of internet marketing and affiliate marketing topics.

Affiliate and publishers can join free at http://offervault.com

Networks interested in getting listed should contact Mark Roth or submit an inquiry here

Contact:

Mark Roth
201-476-1204
info(at)offervault(dot)com

ADOTAS – For companies that are accelerating marketing efforts to make the most of the upcoming holiday season, it’s still not too late to initiate a performance marketing strategy. With the ability to literally add thousands of additional marketing staff to support your online presence practically overnight, affiliate programs can prove to be cost effective and revenue generating for advertisers and publishers alike.

For David’s Cookies, affiliates are key to boosting our company’s sales. Like many consumer-oriented businesses, the holiday season can represent the lion’s share of the company’s annual profits and David’s Cookies is no exception. In fact, in recent years we’ve seen our sales increase almost 700 percent in the last six weeks of the year. To sustain continued growth and expand our buying audience of individual consumers as well as corporate gift sales, we invested in a performance marketing program.

Through our affiliate program, David’s Cookies is able to quickly scale our team of online marketers to support the holiday season without requiring the traditional training, management or overhead associated with seasonal employees. Through the added army of online marketers, we can more easily be front-and-center delivering targeted offers at the right time to buyers. With the flexibility to test out marketing campaigns and evaluate program success in near real-time, we can also make adjustments immediately, which is especially important when every minute counts during the holiday shopping season.

What’s amazing? Affiliate programs are based on a pay-per-performance model. As a result, the profits are more immediately realized by the publishers which further incentivizes them to drive more traffic to our website. An additional benefit of our performance marketing program is the ease of building partnerships that are mutually beneficial to all parties in the network.

While there are many benefits to a performance marketing program, it’s not as simple as joining a network and waiting for the profits to roll in.

One of the first and most important decisions is to determine which performance marketing program, or programs, to join. While there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of options, determining the best program that most closely aligns with your business goals can be challenging. Since advertisers and publishers typically join between two to three different performance marketing networks, here are three questions you should ask yourself to assess which performance marketing network and program options are best for your business needs.

1. What evaluation criteria does the performance marketing network use to determine who can join the network — when it comes to both advertisers and publishers?
2. What is the cost to join the network? It’s true that you get what you pay for yet don’t let cost be your sole determining factor. A recent blog post on Affiliate Tip further underscores this point and outlines the dangers of low cost of entry/low return programs.
3. What’s the process for getting new publishers and retailers up and running with a performance marketing program? While many organizations wisely steer away from introducing new marketing approaches during the busy holiday season the team at LinkShare promises that advertisers and publishers can be fully up and running with their performance marketing program within two weeks.

Once the performance marketing network has been selected, the advertiser, publisher and performance marketing provider equally share the responsibilities to manage and ensure the success of the program. From retailers, here are some tips for proactively addressing and avoiding three of the most common challenges that face new entrants when they join a performance marketing network.

1. Motivating publishers. Many publishers participate in several affiliate networks so how do you make sure that you remain top of mind? One way to do this is to carefully assess the costs associated with your company hiring additional holiday marketing staff through a traditional model versus the cost of temporarily increasing the revenue structure for publishers in a performance marketing network. Depending on the percentage of cost savings gained through a performance marketing program, an advertiser can redirect a portion of those costs to their affiliate publishers.

For David’s Cookies, by increasing the revenue share for publishers by a few percentage points for six weeks, we have seen sales increase by as much as 300 percent. Along with boosting revenue share, an online merchant can also consider providing additional bonuses as well as free quality merchandise. We’ve also found that generating special offers for strategic partners helps to strengthen the relationship, increase traffic and boost sales.

2. Ensuring quality content. It’s no secret that many people read online content and blogs because they provide information and insight that is consistently current, accurate and engaging. When there are hundreds or thousands of publishers promoting your company’s offerings, you want to be able to maintain some control over how and where your company appears online. This is yet another reason why it’s worthwhile to join a higher quality performance marketing network because they carefully evaluate publishers before they are accepted into the program and consistently evaluate their progress and activities.

3. Successfully executing a performance marketing strategy. Since nobody knows your business better than you do, the most successful performance marketing programs can’t happen without commitment from the advertiser. While the infrastructure may be in place to succeed in terms of joining a quality performance marketing network and having a widespread team of publishers promoting your products, without dedication from the advertiser, the program will not yield the highest possible results.

To make the most of your investment in a performance marketing program, it’s important to build a relationship with the account manager at the performance marketing network. Since the account managers are equally dedicated to your company’s success, they’re an important ally and resource. Going beyond providing an in-depth analysis of the program status, they can also generate ideas, help with market testing, provide strategy and make recommendations for tactical execution of plans to further cultivate your online presence and avoid potential missteps.

While end-of-year activities can be all encompassing, prioritize the relationship with your performance marketing account manager to make the most of the holiday season.

For David’s Cookies, participating in a performance marketing network has proven to be a valuable investment that helps drive revenue and brand awareness for our company. Since we joined the LinkShare network eight years ago, we have been able to grow our direct to consumer sales by double-digit percent increases each year.

Harris Beber is vice president of e-commerce for David’s Cookies.

If you’ve never heard of Missy Ward, then join the club. Most people in agencies have never heard of her, despite her being one of the most influential people in the world in one of the fastest growing segments of interactive advertising: Affiliate Marketing.  She’s also the owner of Affiliate Summit, which has become the largest conference in the world for affiliate marketing and is the must-attend place for anyone in the industry to go. It’s grown so large, so fast that one major player in the told me that probably within a year or two it would overtake ADTECH as the largest conference in the industry–  a claim which is hard to believe until you see the list of exhibitors which include everyone from EBAY to AMAZON, companies that don’t exhibit at ADTECH.

Yet, as mentioned, most of the interactive advertising industry hasn’t heard of Missy. They better shape up and start paying attention however to what she is saying. For some reason the interactive advertising industry has grown into two huge parts:  the brand world and the Affiliate Marketing world. While many people call the Affiliate Marketing world the Direct Response world, the industry itself thinks of itself more and more as “Affiliate” or “Performance” marketing. These two worlds exist side by side, but for some reason there are very few people who cross the line and work in both – or very few that admit it. While more and more agencies are adopting CPA and performance marketing models, and hiring employees from companies like COPEAC, Azoogle and Commission junction, they are trying to keep this push somewhat secret.

However if you look at the attendance at Affiliate Summit, you’d never guess the two worlds are at odds. Over 30% of the attendeeship is from agencies, including the major agencies that only push the brand play. They aren’t willing to admit it, but they are to some degree desperate to understand this part of the industry, which often seems like a weird mix of word of mouth marketing , search and display.  One agency head told me that it was not that they didn’t understand affiliate marketing, but that they didn’t know how to make it fit with their existing clients – which didn’t seem quite right. Amazon.com, one of the leading web properties in the world was one of the earlier adopters of Affiliate marketing, and still to this day has an active, vibrant affiliate marketing program that produces the majority of their new advertising traffic.  If you sign up to any major affiliate marketing company, you will see a list of major brand companies including Dell and Microsoft.

I sincerely believe that brands actually do want to learn about affiliate marketing, that they are interested in having a conversation, but there are agencies out there that are scared of doing anything that changes their current dynamic. They’ve argued so long that brand marketing is only about eyeballs, that they can’t see that the two worlds don’t actually clash – that there are programs that can pay on a performance but also drive eyeballs and reach the audiences they want. Then again, just ten years ago there were brick-and-mortar ad houses that were arguing that interactive advertising would never provide the brand opportunities that television had, and that television networks would always dominate the advertising space.

Affiliate marketers, as a group are innovators. They are often seen by the brand media as no more than “get rich quick” people, despite long term, successful businesses.  Yes, there are those segments in the affiliate marketing industry, just like the industry at a whole that is composed of adware scammers, get-rich DVD pushers, and the same – but even in this segment there are those who are engaged in innovative processes to gain attention to their clients. It’s too easy to group everyone together and ignore the real processes that occur in the affiliate marketing world, which includes the real ability of affiliate marketers to connect to consumers – to get them to listen and pay attention.

Another common excuse I hear is that brands are scared because they are worried about protecting their brand. This might have been an excuse during the start of the affiliate marketing world, but so much technology and fraud measures have been created in the last few years that any worry of rogue affiliates is less possible than ever. Affiliate companies live off of production and the reputable ones have compliance and monitoring teams working full time to discover even the slightest deviation from the norm in reporting. In fact, I would argue that the technology developed to detect fraud in the affiliate marketing industry far outweighs what most display ad networks and agencies have, and many display networks need to learn about policing from the affiliate industry.  Having been involved in both discovering and helping prosecute impression fraudsters, I can tell you that the affiliate marketing industry examines their relationships considerably more than any display network I’ve ever seen.

Agencies need to take a better look at the Missy and listen to what she is talking about.  I promise if they don’t they will slowly find more and more of their clients leaving and going to those companies that actually know who she is.

If you are like me, and been around the block a few times and beat up by at least a dozen affiliates in the industry, you know the name COPEAC and Intermark Media. Today, Intermark Media announced that they were going to change their name to IMM Interactive after 11 years of being Intermark Media. This follows several major branding changes of other major players including Azoogle to Epic Direct, CPAEmpire to Affiliatedotcom, IncentaClick to CX Digital and Neverblue to the Canadian BlueManGroup. I believe this to be part of a rapidly changing industry, where companies like Intermark are going to continue growing substantially, leaving those who don’t know how to make these changes in the dust.

While Intermark Media has been around for over a decade, they were never considered to be the largest of players.  We all knew of the guys over and made fun of their Long Island accents, but that was about it. Then something happened in the last few years and suddenly they are on the Inc 500 list   of the top growing players in the industry. While people used to think of ClickBooth, Azoogle and Hydra as the big daddies of the industry, now IMMi’s affiliate network COPEAC is listed in the same breath. Something happened that allowed this company to make huge strides in the last few years and grow substantially. What exactly is that difference?

At the head of the company is Mike Krongel, the founder of the company. Him and his wife Danielle are what make that difference – it’s their drive, their dedication, the culture that makes IMMi. While many affiliate networks kept on doing the same old thing, not changing their model of focusing on spam, working with the same partners, Mike was out there pounding the virtual payment, making contacts and doing business with everyone. He became involved with the community, joined affiliate organizations, got his name out there and let everyone know that while he wasn’t the biggest dog in the house right then, he was going to do everything he could to take over that title.

On top of that, he was extremely active in the message boards. While I don’t recommend everyone going on boards like WickedFire – and note that many of the members currently hate this publication, he is an active member of WickedFire and several other affiliate communities. He interacted with them when it was necessary and learned from the marketers what was upcoming, who he should be doing business with, what products he should be promoting.  He ignored the pleading of some of the “major networks” (who are no longer on the inc 500 after losing money in 2009) that it wasn’t the way to do business and found his own way of doing things.

If there is anything to be learned from Mike Krongel it is to keep on trying until you hit what works.  While tons of companies in the industry have come and gone, been “one-hit” wonders, IMMi has been there for over a decade, working in this industry, being an intimate part of what makes this industry interesting.

The News Corp owned Myspace social networking website could soon lay off as many as half of their employees, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Monday.

WSJ reporters Jessica E. Vascellaro and Russell Adams, citing sources familiar with the matter, say that the California-based website could be cutting between one-third and one-half of their 1,100 employees in what they refer to as a “dramatic downsizing of its business.” The cuts could even come before the end of the month, according to their sources.

“The restructuring is the latest step in Myspace’s intensifying turnaround effort,” Adams and Vascellaro said in their report. “The social network reduced its staff by nearly 30% last summer, laying-off hundreds of employees. But the cuts weren’t sufficient to contain costs, a person familiar with the matter said, who added the new cuts would be across the board.”

“Another person familiar with the matter said that, depending on the results of the restructuring, News Corp. may look for buyers for Myspace but there are no current talks over a sale,” the WSJ reporters added.

Myspace was acquired by News Corp, the parent company of Fox Television, for $580 million in 2005. Since then, they have been unable to keep up with social networking competitors, including the uber-popular Facebook.

In November of last year, Vascellaro and Adams say that Facebook attracted more than 150 million unique visitors in the US alone. Myspace’s traffic was slightly over one-third of that, and marked a 15% decrease from a year ago while Facebook enjoyed a 50% increase over that same time period.

According to Jemima Kiss of the Guardian, News Corp COO Chase Carey “signaled the beginning of the end for MySpace during an earnings call in October when he said the site’s losses were ‘not acceptable or sustainable’ … He also told the Reuters Global Media Summit in November: ‘There are opportunities here to do 20 things, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to do any of the 20. If there’s something there that makes sense you ought to think about it.'”

Brought to you by Redorbit.com. Find Technology News at RedOrbit.