Affiliate Marketing Blog by Geno Prussakov » branding

Leverage Your Personal Brand for Affiliate Success

Geno — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:11:48 +0000

If you’re planning on attending Affiliate Summit West 2011, and would like to hear me speak, I hereby invite you to a panel I am doing with two (edit: three) distinguished digital marketers (and well-known speakers too) Marty Fahncke, Jim Kukral, and Barbara Rozgonyi (added to panel on 10/27/2010).

There is still time to plan a trip to the Summit, and I certainly hope to see you there.

Here are some details on the panel we’ll be doing:

Title: Leverage Your Personal Brand for Affiliate Success

Description: Many successful affiliate marketers transcend the brands they represent and become a brand themselves. Learn how they turned their face, personality and reputation into affiliate success.Many successful affiliate marketers transcend the brands they represent and become a brand themselves. Learn how they turned their face, personality and reputation into affiliate success.

Date: Monday, January 10

Time: 2:00 pm-3:00 pm PST

Place: Wynn Las Vegas

Even if you’re not going, but there are any particular questions you’d like us to cover, please post them in the “Comments” are below.

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Digital Marketer’s Twitter 100+ Master List

Geno — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:29:29 +0000

Over the past two months I’ve been compiling publishing lists of Twitter users related to digital marketing. You have been commenting and adding your own suggestions (which have been highly appreciated!)

Today I have decided to collect all of this data into one master list (which now contains over 100 unique Twitter accounts:

Analytics – 20 must-follow experts + 9 from your comments (start with @) = 29
Branding & PR – 7 experts to learn from + 5 from comments = 12
Content – 8 (copy)writing resources = 8
Conversion Optimization – 7 optimization gurus + 2 from comments = 9
Mobile – 15 mobile marketing experts + 4 from comments = 19
Reading & Learning – 15 (+1) accounts for daily reading = 16
Research - 7 resources to follow = 7
Social Media – 7 resources to watch + 1 from comment = 8

Have fun studying the above list(s), and let me know what next area of digital marketing you want a list for! Just post about it in the comments area below, and I’ll work on it for you.

Also, if it so happened that I’ve left out your favorites, please post about them below too.

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7 Branding and PR Experts to Follow on Twitter

Geno — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:11:44 +0000

Management of your brand online (be it a personal, or a corporate brand) is arguably one of the most important things you should care about.

There are a number of experts that regularly blog and write articles on the subject and are also active on Twitter (sharing their own thoughts and tweeting what others write/say on the subject).

If you’re serious about improving your branding and PR skills, especially when it comes to doing it via Social Media and the Internet in general, this Friday I recommend that you start following the 7 Twitter accounts I’m listing below:

Chris Brogan — Expert in online business communications, marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies. Co-author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book Trust Agents.
Outspoken Media — Internet marketing agency focused on such areas as online reputation monitoring, Social Media, content creation, blog consulting, community building and much more. Known for its “honest, sometimes in-your-face approach to Internet marketing”
David Meerman Scott — Marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Brian Solis — One of the original thought leaders in the area of Social Media and PR 2.0. Shares his views and insights on the convergence of PR, traditional media and Social Media
Bill Stoller — 25-year PR pro helping others get their share of publicity; editor and founder of the Free Publicity Newsletter.
David E. Henderson — Brand journalist, communications advisor, media strategist, Emmy Award winning former CBS newsman, author of Marketing News in the Digital Era and Making News.
David Kirk — Public relations consultant with 30+ years of experience.

As always, if your favorite “tweeple” that work in this area are missing from my above list, please do add them by posting a link to their Twitter profile in the comments below.

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Pinnacle of Success: Brand Replacing Common Word

Geno — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:22:53 +0000

Being a linguist, I have always been fascinated by this phenomenon in the development of language(s) — when a proper name becomes a common noun (or even a verb). By definition nouns name people, places, and things. There are two classes of nouns: common and proper. Common nouns name general items, while proper nouns name specific items (such as individuals, places, or brands) and almost always begin with a capital letter (it may be different specifically with brands).

However, every once in a while we observe instances when proper nouns become common nouns (or even verbs), replacing already existing words in the language with the more frequently used proper nouns, including brand names. That, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of branding.

Not too long ago Guy Kawasaki tweeted:

His post links to an article in the Washington Post which talks about the words of the decade and the words of 2009, and ends with:

…After much discussion, the final vote. A year and a decade, both recently laid to rest, receive the briefest kind of epitaph. The two words meant to evoke the feeling of this moment years from now: “tweet” for 2009 and “Google” for the Aughts [underlining mine].

Yes, the American Dialect Society has chosen “Tweet” as the word of the year 2009, and “Google” as the word of the decade. More and more frequently “Google” is being used as a verb, replacing the phrase “search online”, and this is the ultimate victory — one that they’ve won in people’s minds.

Here are some other examples when proper names had come to replace already existing common nouns:

“Band-Aid” – for “adhesive bandage”
“Bikini” – for any “two piece bathing suit”
“Chapstick” – for “lip balm”
“Escalator” – originally patented by OTIS, and developped on basis of two words: “escalade” and “elevator”
“Granola” – for “oat and fruit mixture” patented back in 19th c.
“Gummie Bears”
“Jacuzzi” – for “hot tub”
“Jeep” – for “SUV” (note: frequently used in Russia)
“Kleenex”
“Kool-aid”
“Laundromat” – for “coing operated laundry”
“Oreos” – for “cream-filled cookies”
“Pampers” – for “diapers” (especially frequently term used in Russia)
“Post-it”
“Scotch Tape”
“Sharpie”
“Teflon”
“Tic Tac”
“Wellingtons” (or “wellies”) – for “rubber boots” (in Britain)
“White-Out”
“Windex” – for “glass cleaner”
“Xerox” – for “photocopy” (note: in Russian, it’s the only word for verb “photocopy”)
“Zipper”

I certainly commend Google and Twitter on their victories. Very encouraging to witness this nowadays, and I am certain we will see other similar language transformations/adaptations in the future too. Wondering who’s gonna be next…

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Nielsen: 6 Out of 10 Consumers Use Direct Type-in

Geno — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:46:05 +0000

Some staggering statistics has been published by the Nielsen Co.’s online division — six out of ten online consumers arrive at e-retailers’ websites through direct type-ins of the retailer’s URL into the address bar of their browser (Google’s URL Suggests were probably included here as well).

AdAge wrote:

Less than 10% of online retailers’ web traffic, on average, comes from search engines…

Nielsen found the majority of retailers’ web traffic (61%, on average) comes from people going directly to a retail site — consumers typing, say, Amazon.com into a browser address bar.

Nielsen’s findings are based on second-quarter traffic for 200 online retailers. The analysis shows that comparison-shopping sites, such as NexTag or Scripps Networks Interactive’s Shopzilla, collectively accounted for about 1% of traffic. Other referrals, such as affiliate programs or advertising (basically anything that wasn’t direct navigation, comparison referrals or search), accounted for the remainder.

Interesting information which once again emphasizes the importance of brand protection in online marketing, and while I am not at all convinced that the direct domain type-ins mean that the consumer hasn’t previously been pre-sold by an affiliate (or other online publisher/campaign), this is not something that I would like to draw merchants’/advertisers’ attention to. I think it is extremely important to emphasize two things in connection with the above-quoted statistics:

Watch out for parasites who may be cannibalizing even on those direct type-ins [video here]
Check your affiliate programs for trademark poachers that know how important trademarks are, and often target just your trademarks exclusively — including “www.brandname”, “brandname.com” and other domain-like keywords typed into SEs’ search boxes [more here]

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Branding in the Digital Age

Geno — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:15:00 +0000

Earlier this morning my friend and famous online marketer, Bryan Eisenberg, tweeted that Razorfish has released its 2009 Digital Brand Experience Report. I closely follow everything that Bryan says and posts (on Twitter, Facebook, or his blogs), and sure enough, this was another gem.

Browsing through this report I have found it absolutely fascinating! Richly illustrated (those illustrations are simply masterpieces, in my opinion), it brings up some extremely interesting stats. Here are just some of the facts that company owners, CEOs, CMOs (and CFOs!) must know about:

Digital brand experiences are not your customary “awareness” or “conversion” plays but rather: customer-creation plays (i.e. “digital brand experiences create customers”).
Depending on how companies treat the digital space, it can either build a brand or break it. “65% of consumers report having had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand” and “of that group, a nearly unanimous 97% say that their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually” made their purchase from that brand.
The new kind of branding/advertising is “branded experiences (or actions)” such as branded games, interaction with the consumer via social media, etc.
Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are quite probably “the outlet malls of tomorrow”. 44% of respondents follow brands on Twitter (and 37% “friend” brands on Facebook and MySpace) to have “access to exclusive deals”.
Consumers spend 34% of their total media time online and 35% watching television.
Customer engagement is now being largely defined in terms of social media interaction with brands.

The full 65-pages report in PDF may be found here. The above is just a sneak peak of what’s in it. I strongly recommend everyone involved in any kind of commerce to review it.

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