Between numerous affiliate marketing blogs, podcasts, forums and magazine publications, there certainly is no lack of online affiliate marketing education out there. However, when it comes to structured (or even face-to-face) learning, the real opportunities aren’t that many. Today I’d like to bring you seven that deserve attention.

Whether we talk about foundational learning and training (be it for affiliates/publishers or merchants/advertisers), or more advanced affiliate marketing education, I recommend considering the following seven opportunities:

1. Econsultancy’s Affiliate Marketing Training

Location: UK
Target audience: advertisers and affiliate managers
Instructor: Chris Bishop of 7thingsmedia
Fee: $800
Format: one-day course
Description: this training course which provides “a practical understanding of affiliate marketing, outlining the strategies, techniques and tricks to achieve a successful, well-managed programme”.

2. Affiliate Management Days ← next one on March 8-9 in San Francisco, CA

Location: USA
Target audience: advertisers, affiliate managers, agencies, affiliate networks
Instructors: multiple experts
Fee: $1,495
Format: two-day professional forum
Description: this conference provides a unique opportunity for focused education (on a wide array of affiliate management-related subjects), as well as professional networking.

3. Affilorama’s Affiliate Marketing Training

Location: online
Target audience: affiliates
Instructors: multiple experts
Fees: $200-$500 range
Format: online education, renewable access licences
Description: they offer a 3-product suite which includes three products — Affilorama Premium, AffiloBlueprint and AffiloJetpack — catering to different needs.

4. Affiliate Management Trainers

Location: virtual or in-person
Target audience: advertisers and affiliate managers
Instructors: multiple experts
Fees: start from $300
Format: individualized training
Description: they custom tailor their training programs to address trainee’s individual needs (be it to “teach you the fundamentals” or to “refine your strategy”) to maximize their success in affiliate marketing.

5. James Martell’s SUPER BootCamp

Location: online
Target audience: affiliates
Instructor: James Martell
Fee: $97/month
Format: online education
Description: “unique blend of recorded and live online events with an expanded curriculum, weekly video lessons, expert audio interviews, interactive 24/7 member community, twice a month live Q&A and personal coaching sessions”.

6. University of San Fancisco’s Certificate in Advanced Affiliate Marketing

Location: online
Target audience: affiliates
Instructors: they rotate, but the full list may be found here
Fee: $2,480.
Format: online education
Description: they start with an introduction and “getting started” type of topics, and go on to/through “knowing your audience, maximizing effects from your efforts, connections and communications, legal and ethical considerations, what the pros know and case studies”.

7. Books

There are a few out there, but the three worth highlighting are (i) Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day, (ii), Strategic Affiliate Marketing, and (iii) The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web.

Of course, do also consider forums such as affiliates4u, ABestWeb and Affiliate Summit‘s forum; as well as podcasts and affiliate marketing blogs (see my 2011 list as well as 2012 one). And make sure you steer clear of anything “overnight”, “passive”, “easy”, or “revolutionary”.

Quality is never an accident …it is always the result of high intention,
sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution
–William A. Foster

If you’ve attended Affiliate Summit West 2012 (or are subscribed to the magazine) you have a copy of the latest FeedFront. For those of you who don’t have it, I’d like to draw your attention to my newest published magazine article — one entitled Seven Precursors of Affiliate Marketing Failure.

I believe that there are 7 major ways to fail at affiliate marketing. In the article I outlined 4 reasons why merchants/advertisers fail, and 3 reasons for affiliate failure. Here they are:

◊  Merchants fail in instances when they

(1) have unrealistic expections of what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and what it will do for them,
(2) try to manage affiliates who are 100% self-managed and hate that “managerial” approach,
(3) expect something for nothing, and/or
(4) launch their affiliate program, and then let it roll on “cruise control”.

◊  Affiliates, on the other hand, fail when they

(1) aren’t devoting the time to thorough due diligence and education,
(2) fake passion, interest, and/or hard work, and/or
(3) fail to diversify and focus on only one niche, or one marketing method.

Whether you are an affiliate or a merchant — the problem most frequently “lays in the misalignment of hopes, goals, expectations and realities” of what works and what doesn’t.

You may download the full issue of this FeedFront here. My article may be found on page 10. It’s got a number of other excellent article in it, and I certainly recommend at least flipping through it.

It’s been some time since my Top 20 Affiliate Marketing Bloggers to Watch in 2011 post. And besides the fact that one of these twenty has claimed her Affiliate Summit’s best blogger award (Tricia Meyer, who is now inspired to reach new blogging heights, and, of course, belongs on my below list), a few other things have happened too.

In fact, the landscape of affiliate blogosphere has been changing almost as dynamically as the industry itself. In the course of late 2011 I’ve spotted quite a few bloggers gaining steam. The spectrum ranges from the fairly new ones to affiliate marketing blogging to those who have been quiet for some time, and are now back in the game. All of these guys (and gals!) deserve a list of their own — one for 2012.

So here we go (again, in alphabetical order, and with everyone’s Twitter handle listed):

10 Affiliate Marketing Bloggers to Watch in 2012

1. Sarah Bundy: SarahBundy.com Blog | Twitter

2. Dave Cupples: FatCowBusiness.com | Twitter

3. Existem’s Team: Affiliates4U News | Twitter

4. Sam Harrelson: SamHarrelson.com Blog | Twitter

5. Impact Radius’ Team: ImpactRadius Blog | Twitter

6. Scott Jangro: Jangro.com Site | Twitter

7. HasOffers’ Team: HasOffers Blog | Twitter

8. Owen Hewitson: Econsultancy Blog posts | Twitter

9. Tricia Meyer: Tricia.me Blog | Twitter

10. Shannon Weidemann: Marketing Elf Blog | Twitter

If I’ve missed your favorite affiliate marketing blogger (especially, if you believe them to be a rising star!) please do mention them in the Comments below.

It is interesting to look back to (and analyze) the predictions that were made in late 2010 regarding 2011. Some of them were right on the money, some didn’t take root (yet)… But it’s time to create a similar post for the Year 2012, which is already here. So, just as it was for 2011 I now bring you predictions for 2012 from affiliate (and digital) marketing experts from four different countries on both sides of the Atlantic. Here they are (in no particular order):

Affiliate Marketing Predictions for 2012

1) With the rising prominence of Product Listing Ads taking up paid search space on the Google SERPs, affiliates will have to rethink their paid search strategy with Google on the long tail product specific searches.

2) From a real estate perspective on the Google SERPs, Google Shopping results will continue to drop on the page.  This should open up more real estate towards the top of the SERPs for organic listings for retailers and affiliates.

– Ned Farra of Zappos (follow them on Twitter)

3) Abusive affiliates will increasingly shift from direct relationships with merchants to indirect relationships through super affiliates with sub-affiliate programs

4) The FTC will take aggressive action against several brands for inappropriate representations made by their affiliates in social media

– David Naffziger of BrandVerity (follow them on Twitter)

5) US merchants will push back on paying multiple, static commissions for the same sale (this being triggered by EU trend in 2011). Continued absorption of ‘affiliate channel’ into mainstream “performance budget” means: (i) path to conversion reporting including PPC, retargeting, display, SEO plays a major role in correctly rewarding/identifying successful affiliates/partners; (ii) split commissions on affiliates will become more common place as merchants see what is delivering incremental sales; (iii) affiliate networks offer contractual wording to accommodate ‘attribution and de-duplication technology’ (source); (iv) merchants remove duplicate/unfair payment in real-time, allowing for re-distribution of spend to smaller affiliate networks; (v) budgets/bounty for successful and fair affiliates will grow, as merchants raise bids for affiliates driving genuine incremental leads/sales based on audited data.

– Chris Brinkworth of TagMan (follow him on Twitter)

6) Low-converting landing pages will be squeezed out in many categories. Unless you have a relentless focus on conversion rate optimization and always provide your affiliates with the highest possible EPC, you are at a huge disadvantage. Without best-practices redesigns and ongoing testing of your key landing pages you will fall behind and never recover.

7) Mobile specialist affiliates will emerge in force. Now that smartphones and tablets have become well-established, there are new and innovative ways to reach on-the-go people. New ways of driving traffic, mobile landing pages, and apps will become more common as affiliates become more sophisticated.

– Tim Ash of SiteTuners (follow him on Twitter)

8 ) Mobile, social and video will take charge… and not necessarily individually. Look for them to be merging even tighter than before. As an example, an affiliate can take a video of a product with a mobile phone and share on a social network today, but look for them to take it even farther and do more with the messaging in 2012.

9) Affiliates will use social media more to advertise. This offers merchants another platform to reach potential customers, but will require close monitoring in order to detect fraud/spamming/TOC violations, etc.

10) Merchants will need to provide more creatives that are optimized for mobile and tablets. No flash banners for these users! They might even want to consider video creatives.

11) According to comScore Video Metrix, 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October 2011 for an average of 21.1 hours per viewer. A year earlier, comScore reported that 175 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October 2010 for an average of 15.1 hours per viewer. An increase of 9 million viewers and 6 more hours per viewer on average over the past 12 months means there is even bigger opportunities for merchants and affiliates to include video in their marketing mix and I don’t expect that to slow down in 2012. I found the info in YouTube Creator Playbook especially helpful when thinking about creating marketing videos. It includes tips, best practices, and strategies to build larger audiences on YouTube and tells you how much effort it will take and what you can expect to get out of each change.

– Sharon Mostyn of SharonMostyn.com (follow her on Twitter)

12) I think variations/iterations of the QCP model that eBay has used for the past 2 years will be implemented further across the industry. I think this will be a result of the natural evolution of multi channel attribution in the affiliate world.

13) I think affiliate marketing as a sole business model will no longer be tenable. I think Google will insert itself more and more into the buying cycle of consumers and the traditional affiliate model will finally die. Affiliates who previously put in the effort in lieu of revenue to build a brand will reap the rewards and those who didn’t listen to Rae Hoffman-Dolan will wish they had. I’m glad I did.

14) I think a lot of affiliates and/or beginning affiliates will give up as Panda will make the barrier to entry too difficult and time consuming to understand. Panda will continue to decimate low quality affiliates and keep higher quality publishers on their toes.

15) I think that most large affiliates/publishers will, with the data and skill set they have built up over the past few years, become merchants themselves.

16) I think that the lack of anonymity for affiliates as a result of the necessity to participate in social to compete will clean the “darker” side of the industry up. Somewhat.

– David Davis of Redfly Marketing (follow them on Twitter)

17) Continued growth in the industry: We’ll continue to see growth in the affiliate channel as technology and expertisebecomes even more sophisticated. Of note, industry analysts at Forrester predicted that the affiliate channel will reach $4B by 2014. Also, in their December 2011 report on the channel, they found that consumers perceive deals offered on affiliate sites as superior to those on the merchant’s website. It’s clear that the steady growth of the industry and consumers’ increasing reliance on affiliate sites will enable the channel to continue to thrive.

18) The evolution of mobile: We’ve been talking about mobile for a while now and the potential it represents for the affiliate channel. In 2012, we’ll see more opportunities in mobile. This will be driven by three factors. The increased number of smart phone users, which is expected to rise by nearly 50 percent from 2011-2015 according to eMarketer. The second factor is that mobile shoppers are expected to reach 72.8 million in 2012, according to eMarketer. Third, the mobile browser shopping experience will become a better user experience. As these two worlds come together they will create more opportunities for advertisers to reach their audience on the users’ preferred device.

19) It’s all about data! Whether it’s on a desktop, smart phone or tablet, the opportunities for advertisers and publishers will be contingent upon their ability to quickly and accurately mine customer data and present the right offer at the right time on the right device. This will require networks to provide sophisticated technology including easy to use, customizable data feeds while ensuring offers are current and relevant.

– Scott Allan of LinkShare (follow them on Twitter)

20) The US economy will continue to grow slowly but with an occasional knockback from growing economic problems in China, rapid oil price fluctuations and European wobbles. That means affiliates, merchants and advertisers will continue to see slow growth too unless they can create new revenue streams through innovation.

21) Several CPA networks will go to the wall as the FTC drives easy profits out of the sector and cash flow pressures mount. This kind of consolidation is a good thing as the CPA network space needs fewer, bigger players to drive increased trust and growth with major brands and agencies. CPA can boom, but it has to do more to educate big-brand CMOs.

22) If Obama loses in November the FTC will lose interest in enforcement.

– Chris Trayhorn of mThink.com (follow them on Twitter)

23) Facile interaction with video content will skyrocket. Companies like Coull and Fullscreen will expand YouTubers’ ability to easily monetize their videos.

24) Performance-based call campaigns will continue to capture more affiliate dollars. Industry leader RingRevenue will expand its current footprint in 9 of the 10 largest affiliate networks, while simultaneously driving calls in the offline world for advertisers whose offerings do not lend themselves to affiliate marketing.

– John Greathouse of Rincon Venture Partners (follow him on Twitter)

25) Google Panda and the dominance of coupon and cashback sites struck a blow to many small and mid-size affiliates in 2011, and they will continue to struggle for survival as a result of assaults on three fronts: coupon/cashback sites, Google, and the recession. Online will continue to become more reflective of the offline world, with the bigger affiliates getting bigger and the small withering away. In every mature e-commerce market a handful of affiliates will be responsible for a huge share of sales.

26) The god that is Google will continue to enact algorithmic refinements which will impact negatively on most affiliate models, with a few exceptions. The Google Remote Rater document that was leaked a while ago stated that coupon and price comparison sites are acceptable. Therefore, the leading affiliates I mention in my first point will be such sites in the CPS space.

27) For CPA-paying advertisers, email and lead generation affiliates will be responsible for an even larger share of leads in 2012 than they were last year. Some of these affiliates operate ethically, others less so, but they will generate enormous volumes of leads. Their databases will grow and, with the continuing demise of CPM advertising, more and more list owners will enter the affiliate marketing fold to broadcast campaigns on a CPA model.

– Nadeem Azam of Azam Marketing, Inc. (follow them on Twitter)

28) For the first time ever Affiliate Summit will cross the cumulative annual mark of 10,000 attendees.

29) A new affiliate management e-Book will be published (insider info: likely to be available in electronic format(s) only).

– Geno Prussakov of Affiliate Management Days (follow me on Twitter)

30) Affiliates will continue to evolve their multi-channel offering helping to drive the performance channel ever more mainstream. In 2011 we saw the UK’s biggest cashback site, Quidco launch a mobile app and offer in-store cashback and voucher code redemption, all supported by a significant marketing push that included TV and other above the line media. Alongside a handful of other well known publishers have established themselves as retail portals in their own right, attracting far more traffic than the vast majority of advertisers they feature. The implications are far reaching with a shift in the traditional publisher/advertiser relationship as well as a multitude of promotional activity, not all performance focused. This development will continue and will help drive the industry further towards professionalism.

31) Evolving this first point we have also seen some initial steps towards embracing the opportunities that mobile offers. At Affiliate Window and buy.at we have spent the past year analyzing our mobile traffic and have seen rapid adoption with our mobile sales and traffic increasing fivefold in the past twelve months. There is a chicken and egg dilemma with mobile however, in that many major advertisers have launched m-commerce sites without affiliate tracking in place. Therefore, where is the incentive for publishers to develop their own mobile proposition? Having said that we have seen incentivized traffic take the lead in 2011 primarily through in-store redemption. I would expect 2012 to see a handful of more engaged advertisers look to focus their energies in using affiliates to drive online traffic in store as well as actively pursue mobile strategies alongside their existing affiliate activity.

32) Regulation will continue to feature largely in the wider digital landscape with the revised ePrivacy Directive being actively enforced from May 2012. The IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council (AMC) has already made a good start at engaging with affiliate marketers in the UK and has devised a five point plan that we will push out in the next few months. As a network we will be focusing our energies on encouraging affiliates to offer greater transparency to consumers on how on-site content is monetised. The AMC will also evolve as it looks to continue its agenda of self-regulation.

– Kevin Edwards of Digital Window (on Twitter: Affiliate Window & buy.at)

33) Niche affiliate networks will become more appealing to affiliates than general ones. This will be caused both by the affiliates’ focus on specific niches and the big/popular merchants joining these networks. Most of the smaller affiliate networks will become more and more focused on certain types of products / services, or they will only target affiliates from specific territories.

34) The ability to segment and target customers from specific territories through affiliates will be an important factor in the big merchants’ choice for the affiliate network(s) to run their programs on.

35) In the software vertical, games and security niches will continue to grow with the strongest rise of the mobile apps vertical. As “new entries” — SaaS and cloud-based end-user services will gain even more ground.

36) Small and medium affiliates will continue to focus on niches. They will prefer to rather have multiple websites for multiple niches rather than one website for all the niches.

37) Local authoritative affiliate websites with original content in form of reviews for products and services will have a bigger slice of the affiliate sales pie. So, to wrap it all up, the two main words in 2012 for affiliate marketing will be “niche” and “local”.

– Cristian Miculi of Avangate (follow him on Twitter)

38) Over the last 12-18 months there has been a noticeable shift for brands to engage an agency to provide the account management for their affiliate campaign. Previously the norm would be that the chosen affiliate network(s) would act as both the technology provider and the service agency. More and more, brands are beginning to take the opinion that the technology provision needs to be separated from the account management and this has lead to a growth in both specialist affiliate agencies, digital media agencies as well as traditional full service media agencies bulking up their digital provision.

39) Further to the above, the market has seen several of the larger full service agency groups launching their own tracking solutions or utilising white-labels with the networks, thereby removing the need for a network at all. Personally, I think this is a trickier route to go down successfully and I think there will continue to be developments within this as with pure play technology providers entering the market to service this need.

40) The other main trend, which ties into the above, is the viewing of affiliate marketing within a wider marketing context. The affiliate sector has always sat slightly separately from “mainstream” online marketing (something that the affiliate community has encouraged in my view) but now brands are beginning to scrutinize the channel more. This is driven partly by the economic situation, partly by a natural maturation of the market and partly by the increasing involvement of media agencies in the arena. This has lead to an increase in the attempted understanding of the part that affiliates play within the overall customer journey and how this knowledge should influence trading discussions and buying behaviour in the affiliate space. Brands themselves are also becoming more sophisticated by incorporating metrics such as lifetime value of a customer in order to truly understand the real value of the affiliate channel.

– Chris Bishop of 7thingsmedia (follow him on Twitter)

If you have something to add to the above, the “Comments” are all yours; and I would highly appreciate your input.

Make sure to also take a look at Matthew Wood‘s post where he reviews 2011 and gives his predictions for 2012, Peter Hamilton‘s expectations of 2012, as well as Chris Johnson‘s summary of IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council’s recent findings pertaining to 2012. Also, my today’s Affiliate Marketing Strategy in 2012 interview to Smart Insights may be something worth checking out.

Several things – important to affiliates, and affiliate marketing industry as a whole — have happened in the course of the past few days, unfortunately not all good, and today I’d like to draw your attention to the following four:

1. Pennsylvania Enacts Affiliate Nexus Tax law — Late last night (on December 1, 2011) the bad news came from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue which “in a surprising move… issued a press release and memorandum… stating that an existing statute has been reinterpreted to include a definition that states out-of-state retailers have nexus (and must collect PA sales tax) if they have affiliate marketers” [more in today's post by the Performance Marketing Association].

2. Bing Bans Holiday Deals Sites — On November 30, it was reported that Bing, in its “version of the Google Panda Update”, has “completely removed some sites deemed thin from its search engine.” Ironically, among others they’ve also banned CyberMonday.com, a website owned by Shop.org which coined the very term “Cyber Monday” back in late 2005 [more in Danny Sullivan's post here]. As Tricia Meyer has rightfully summarized, this article is “eye opening for affiliates” — “especially those who rely on search engines for all their traffic.”

3. Federal Sales Tax Reform — The reform which can remove the Affiliate Nexus Tax, “potentially getting 60,000 devastated affiliate marketers back in business”, is gaining a “growing support” and “has a very good chance of passage” [more in the Performance Marketing Association's article here].

4. £1 Million Incubator for Affiliate Marketing — In the U.K. TradeDoubler has launched The Zoo Project, a unique initiative “offering £1m worth of business resources and industry mentoring to help” affiliate startups, fostering/encouraging affiliate marketing innovation [more in this article from November 30, 2011 at MyCustomer.com].

It certainly is a dynamic industry we work in… If I’ve missed a important news that belongs here, please do submit it through the “Comments” area below.

While every once in a while I do blog about things that are useful for affiliates, my blog is more advertiser/merchant- and affiliate program manager-oriented.

However, nearly every day I have people contacting me for “affiliate marketing tips” and “advice” on how to make money as an affiliate. Since the start of this week (i.e. in the course of the past 5 days) I’ve had 8 people (5 emails, 1 phone call, 1 LinkedIn message, and 1 blog comment) ask me to help them with affiliate advice. It just seems like a “perfect storm” situation, if you know what I mean… a perfect confluence of requests to make me put together the below list.

So, today I bring you 10 quality online resources to teach yourself affiliate marketing as an affiliate (the order is merely alphabetical, and all of these deserve your attention):

10 Free Online Resources on Affiliate Marketing

1. a4u portal — UK-based performance marketing hub, which includes Europe’s largest affiliate marketing forum, news, jobs board, and blogs, which I especially recommend checking out.
2. ABestWeb forum — The world’s largest affiliate marketing forum with 65,000+ members, and hundreds of thousands of discussions. Newbie FAQs is a good section to start your journey from.
3. Affiliate ABCs podcasts — Series of podcasts by seasoned affiliate marketers, Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare, focused on affiliate education.
4. Affiliate Summit forum — Official forum by and for Affiliate Summit attendees; one of the newer affiliate marketing forums, yet, one of the faster growing ones. Check out the Affiliate Q&A.
5. Affilorama — A New Zealand-based “training and community site for aspiring affiliate marketers”. Check out especially their Affiliate Marketing Lessons section.
6. FeedFront magazine — Official magazine of Affiliate Summit. The subscription is free, but online you may also view all previous issues (which date back to June 2008), as well as individual articles.
7. How To Guide to Affiliate Marketing [for Affiliates] — 50+ affiliate questions answered by yours truly
8. JamesMartell.com — James knows his thing. Make sure you check out his regular Affiliate Buzz podcast, as well as his blog.
9. ReveNews — One of the oldest performance marketing publications, which since 1998 has been publishing online articles on affiliate marketing, and everything related to it.
10. Revenue Performance — Originally published as the only print magazine on affiliate marketing. Now also has a website where you may review past articles.

Of course, merchants (and affiliate program managers) should bookmark these as well.

As always, if I have missed your favorite resource, please do mention it in the “Comments” area below.

If you’ve seen summaries (like this one, for example) of Matt Cutts’ yesterday’s video on cloaking, you may have read that cloaking is always in violation of Google’s quality guidelines and there is “no such thing as white hat cloaking”. Yes, he actually did say that no “white hat cloaking” exists, but there was something else — hugely important for honest affiliates — that the legendary head of Google’s Webspam team said in that video. To begin with, here’s how he defined “cloaking”:

So, first off, what is cloaking? Cloaking is essentially showing different content to users than to Googlebot…

Secondly, in conclusion of the video, he summarized:

…basically, ask yourself: “Do I have special code that looks exactly for the user agent Googebot, or the exact IP address of Googlebot, and treat it differently somehow. If treat it just like everybody else — so you’d send it based on geolocation, you look at the end agent phones — that sort of thing is fine. It’s just that [when] you’re looking for Googlebot specifically, and you’re doing something different that’s where you start to get into a high risk area.

Based on the above, it all boils down to the intent of the cloaking. Are you trying to trick Google into believing something about your webpage that it’s really not? If you are, you’re asking for trouble… If you aren’t, and cloaking your affiliate links to make them more manageable (and/or secure) — as discussed in my Affiliate Link Cloaking post back in May 2009 — you should be okay.

EDIT (of 3:50 pm): Furthermore, it is apparent — both from the video, and from this tweet by Matt — that “cloaking” is really not the best word to describe what affiliates are predominantly doing. Call it URL “masking”, “shortening”, “disguising”, anything else, but not “cloaking”.

Full Matt Cutts’ video on Google’s stance regarding cloaking may be seen below:

It appears that while I do my best to take note of positive news and developments in the industry it is when I blog about problems (read: a negative news/issues) that I get most interest and participation from my readers. And unfortunately this is natural… But today I’d like to focus on the good — especially so since there are some really good news and developments to report. Here are the three that have really impressed me over the past few days:

AvantLink Pioneers App Market

Don’t know what took affiliate networks so long to start something like this, but glad to see it finally happen — AvantLink has launched an Affiliate Marketing App Market, “allowing developers from around the world to add functionality to the network” [source]. The idea is, actually, pretty simple/straightforward: (i) developers create apps using AvantLink’s API, (ii) affiliates use them for free (no additional fees; “you keep your entire commission for any sales made using any app”), and (iii) every time an affiliate sale is made using the developers tool, he/she also gets a commission or “20% of the network’s commission for every sale generating through the app” (yep, they’ve actually structured it as an affiliate program). Good development, and kudos to AvantLink for creating the platform and the good motivation to empower affiliates.

Skimlinks Introduces Real-Time Affiliate Marketing

Remember when Skimlinks acquired Atma Links this summer? Immediately following it I asked Alicia Navarro, Skimlinks’ CEO, if she can give my readers a “sneak-peak into what other new features they should expect from the combined Skimlinks+AtmaLinks solution”. She replied that the combined solution wasn’t in too distant of a future, and said: “what I can share now is that their technology specialises in highly accurate, multi-vertical product identification and matching” and “we can apply this to a number of our existing products (particularly EveryFeed – our aggregated product API) as well as other publisher tools we offer our customers”… Well, they’ve just rolled the combined technology out, calling it SkimWords 2.0. The new creation is being characterized by an “unparalleled accuracy and speed as it analyzes page content to recognize product references and deliver in-text affiliate links, and optionally show product and price comparison information, all in real-time” [more here]. I am particularly fond of this new development, because it is linguistics-related (and, while not many know it, I’m a linguist by first education). SkimWords 2.0 is supported by AtmaLinks’ computational linguistics and semantic algorithms. They match content/text with tens of millions of products, creating real-time in-text affiliate links. Amazing development!

7ThingsMedia Exemplary Communication/Management

Yesterday, 7ThingsMedia, a UK affiliate program management agency, has sent out an “Apologies for the mistake” email to all Agent Provocateur‘s affiliates. Here’s the core of the text:

I just wanted to email you personally to apologise for the email sent regarding an admin error that occured on Commission Junction this afternoon regarding the Agent Provocateur affiliate programme.

The programme was accidently deactivated today at 15.56, the mistake was noticed straight away and the account was re-activated at 16.11. All affiliate links are working and commissions will be rewarded.

If you have any questions about this then please do email me on [email here] or give me a call on [phone number here].

I don’t know about you, but this is the first time I’ve seen an apology sent out for a 15 minute downtime which has probably not even been noticed by the majority of the affiliates in the program. All of this spells out one very important word — integrity. Kudos to 7thingsmedia for doing it right! This certainly gives affiliates hope that there are affiliate managers out there who know how to handle things right.

Important Disclaimer: None of the above news coverage were in any way “sponsored” by anyone. They reflect my sole personal opinion.

On Friday last week, Susan Payton has published an interesting (and important) article at Small Business Trends, entitling it The War Against Affiliate Marketing Continues. She started it with: “it seems to keep getting harder to run your business, thanks to companies that don’t want to support affiliate marketers”, and then went through 3 things:

1. Google said they didn’t like “thin” affiliate marketing sites [more here]
2. Amazon (and others) terminated affiliates over the affiliate nexus tax
3. MailChimp announced affiliates are now “personas non gratas” [more here]

All of these are real problems, and I appreciate Susan drawing people’s attention to them. However, the more I think of these, the more I wonder — is this really a “war” or more of a “business as usual”? Are these obstacles (conditions that “impede progress or achievement“) or challenges (“threatening, provocative, stimulating, or inciting” circumstances)?

Some will say “both”. To me too, but more than anything else, I believe them to be challenges, or surmountable obstacles, and conditions that, when dealt with, can really make us stronger: both as an industry, and as individual businesses.

Not that this doesn’t make it all akin to a “war” though…

As always, the “Comments” are all yours.

Between yesterday and today, a sequence of events has happened, raising an important question… Let me quickly reproduce them for you:

1. I found a product I was interested in. It was one of the major — one of the top ones on The Top 500 List — e-tailers selling it.
2. I placed my order through an affiliate link (I frequently do this, believing that hard-working affiliates deserve the support), which went through and got confirmed.
3. This morning I received a new email from the merchant, inviting me to join their special customer program (with lots of cool perks).
4. Being an affiliate marketing guy, I’ve decided to check their affiliate TOS, and see that once I join the customer program, all of my further orders through affiliate links “will result in a correction or a reversal of commission” for affiliates whose links I may use.

Whether this was a coincidence or a part of their marketing strategy (something inclines me to believe that it was the latter), I have mixed thoughts and feelings about this one. Had it been a CPL (Cost Per Lead) affiliate program, I would’ve not given this incident so much attention. After all, you’ve paid for this “lead” already. Why pay again? Now with CPS (Cost Per Sale) affiliate programs, having something like the above in place is similar to paying for new customers only, and no merchant can be 100% certain that the customer will definitely return to them. Therefore, I do have a problem with this practice.

Would love to hear other affiliate program managers’ and affiliates’ thoughts on this one.