August 2010

How to Deal with Fraudulent Affiliates

Almost immediately after posting my 9 affiliate fraud prevention tips on Econsultancy I have received the following question from a merchant: If we do detect a fraudulent affiliate, do you think it’s standard/best practice to remove him or her from the program without paying out the commissions they’ve “earned”? “Earned”?

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3 Types of Direct Contact for Affiliate Recruitment

A friend and fellow affiliate marketer, Mark Welch, writes that “the single most important source of successful affiliates is a direct invitation from the program manager to the site owner or advertising manager” (source: Affiliate Recruitment Strategies and Practices post). I fully concur with Mark here. Interestingly enough, out of

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Interview with Jason Spievak, CEO of RingRevenue

If you’ve attended the most recent Affiliate Summit East in New York (August 15-17, 2010) or Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco (August 16-20, 2010), you have probably already seen the newest August 2010 (issue 5) edition of the Revenue Performance magazine. This issue has published my recent interview with

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25 Twitter Accounts to Follow for Small Business Advice

It’s Friday again, and I decided to dedicate my today’s #FollowFriday-style post to experts and companies that tweet great small business advice. My list is actually made up of two smaller lists: 10 people, and 15 periodicals and small business communities to follow. Disclaimer: None of the below are meant

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Effectiveness of Online Video: CTR, Conversion & Other Data

A merchant, who is launching an affiliate program, has emailed me the following question: How effective would very well produced videos be as creatives? We were thinking of possibly having some videos made and wanted to know how well these tend to pull in traffic and sales vs banners and

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How Conversion Optimization Increased Performance by Over 50%

In the beginning of this year, while replying to a completely different question, I wrote: The responsibility for conversion of affiliate-referred traffic is always a shared one: (i) affiliates should work on making it a targeted traffic, while (ii) merchants should ensure that their own websites actually convert. I have

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Affiliate Link Performance Metrics are Misleading

Having analyzed how affiliates see links on 5 affiliate networks — Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network, and AvantLink — I have noticed that 2 of these 5 (CJ and AvantLink) offer data on link performance. Commission Junction shows link’s 3-months and 7-days EPC: AvantLink, in their turn, displays

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Good Affiliate Application or What Affiliate Managers Want to See

About a month ago, I made a blog post on the 3 signs that tell you to decline an affiliate application. It was an international (i.e. non-US) affiliate, and an Ireland-based search and affiliate marketer, Dave Davis quickly commented: Wow, awesome seeing the “other side” of the applications. This example

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