As the year 2009 was coming to an end,  I was approached by the Revenue Performance magazine’s editor-in-chief, who asked me to share my thoughts on how I envisage the affiliate marketing landscape in 2010, what I believe to be the main areas growth, as what will be the areas of challenge.

My article came out in January 2010:

The 6 predictions I have made were:

1. Social media will blossom, contributing to the growth of affiliate marketing;
2. Following the spread of the mobile Internet, mobile marketing will also grow quickly;
3. Transparency will be central, and consumers will continue their active participation in shaping brands;
4. It will be the year of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), and those affiliate marketers that aren’t yet actively involved, should be;
5. Online video (no matter what quality; content is key) is set to boom;
6. More legislative fights should be expected.

Today mThink has published that article of mine online, and you may read it in full here.

Every week I read dozens of articles published online. Naturally, the vast majority of them are directly related to online marketing in general, and affiliate marketing in particular. The abundance of excellent content published online is so great that I never have enough time to incorporate what I learn into my own writing, and my today’s blog post aims at fixing this to at least to a degree.  Today I’d like to bring to your attention the 10 most interesting, in my opinion, posts and articles that have appeared online in the course of the past week. Most of them are very practical, and chock-full of invaluable advice that marketers can take and apply right away… A few of them are news (or other data) that I have found to be either of interest, or even of inspiration.

Here is my list (the order in which the below posts appear is random, and in no way reflective of any preference, or importance):

– 1 –

5 Great Ways to Waste Money in Google Adwords
Whether you are a merchant or an affiliate just starting with paid search, this article is a must read for you.

– 2 –

30+ Principles to a Better Landing Page Design
Successful web page design rests on four pillars: (i) research, (ii) design, (iii) copy, (iv) testing and improving. More in this article.

– 3 –

Multivariate Testing, 1 2 3 …
Good article on what and how to test. If you’re not yet into testing and analytics, hop aboard!

– 4 –

Give Your Affiliate Campaigns the Psychological Edge and Boost Conversions
Invaluable collection of links on how to employ psychological principles to improve conversions, or motivate people to buy.

– 5 –

What Super Bowl Advertising Can Teach Your Small Business
While I do not share point #2, the rest of this article is very useful for all kinds of marketers.

– 6 –

What Your Form Design Reveals About You
How to improve form design (thereby showing you care about your visitors) to increase your conversion rates.

– 7 –

9 Tricks I Used to Triple My AdSense Earnings in 30 Days
Hundreds of thousands of webmasters are using Google AdSense to monetize their websites. Must read article on what to improve to start earning more.

– 8 –

100 Top Entrepreneurs Who Succeeded Without a College Degree
An interesting list of 100 entrepreneurs who have achieved the pinnacle of success – some even without an elementary school degree.

– 9 –

Confirmed: Google Acquires Social Search Engine Aardvark
Big news: Vark.com acquired by Google for some $50 million. Official post here.

– 10 –

comScore Reports U.S. E-Commerce Spending in Q4 2009 Reached $39 Billion
December 15 ranked as heaviest U.S. online spending day in history at $913M. More in this post.

Remember the “Gone in 60 Seconds” movie? Well, an average website visitor gives our websites and landing pages considerably less time that that.  Some believe that “up to 50 percent of visitors to landing pages will bail in the first eight seconds” [source]. My friend, Avinash Kaushik, believes they’re giving us even less time. In a recent article in The Vancouver Sun he was quoted to state that the average visitor “will give your website two-and-a-half seconds before they leave.” 2.5 seconds, ladies and gentlemen! What are you doing not only to retain that visitor, but also to facilitate conversion? No, not every visitor is destined to convert, regardless of what your boss may think [more in The Myth of Perfect Conversion article by Tim Ash], but some of them will never convert unless you have paid a close attention to each of the following 6 factors:

1) Value Proposition or “what are you offering in exchange for what you are asking?”

2) Relevance of your offer to the visitor’s context (their personal needs and wants)

3) Clarity of offer and call to action

4) Anxiety “or anything on the page that causes uncertainty” vs. Guarantee

5) Distraction of the visitor by too many choices/offers on the landing page

6) Urgency or is your proposition giving them a compelling enough of a reason to act, and do so now

[adopted from Chris Goward as quoted here]

The above 6 factors will have immediate impact on your website’s/webpage’s conversion (or lack thereof); but even if you have entertained all of the above, never stop testing and improving (replicating and polishing what works) your landing pages. As I was growing up, and we were improving our home, my father taught me that home improvement/remodeling can never be limited to any one task, but is rather an ongoing process. “You can pause it, but you can never fully complete it” – he’d say. The same is true about website improvement/remodeling. While we will never attain perfection, we can get closer to it every day.