Affiliate fraud can take can take different forms. Most of them as well as the ways to prevent these from happening were discussed here. Today I’d like to draw affiliate program managers’ attention to one particular feature available to merchants on one particular network. I am a strong believer that good work deserves good praise. Hence, this post.

ShareASale is a network known for its strong ethical stance, and I really appreciate what they’re doing to help merchants make wiser decisions on affiliate applications. Not many people know it, but ShareASale is, in my knowledge, the only affiliate network that has an affiliate feedback score feature. Essentially, it’s a way for merchants who have previously worked with an affiliate to leave their feedback on an affiliate. As ShareASale puts it the “feedback scale is absolute, with 1 point given for a positive rating, and 1 point taken away for a negative.” Also, for affiliates: “if a merchant leaves negative feedback, it will then show up in your account and give you a chance to respond or rebut the claim” [source]. So, an affiliate who is truly kosher, shouldn’t end up displaying this terrible of a feedback score:

The above is a screenshot of an affiliate application I’ve received this morning. Needless to say what my decision was.

If you’re running an affiliate program on ShareASale, make sure you put this feature to good use. It will save you a lot of headaches (yes, I’ve approved affiliates with negative feedback before, and I know from experience what results it leads to) in the future.

As announced in the last week’s press release AM Navigator was shortlisted in the Best Affiliate Marketing Blog category of The Affiliate Marketing Awards 2011.

On a number of reasons I couldn’t attend the awards ceremony, which was held yesterday evening (April 12, 2011) at the W Hotel in San Francisco, California. Neither have I seen anyone blog about the award winners yet, but I do see the list of them posted on the Awards’ official website, and it looks like my name is among the winners:

Thank you, everyone who nominated me (it was a pleasant surprise), and everyone who voted for me. It’s both an honor, and great encouragement to keep going.

By the way, I’m also pleased to see that Volusion, whose affiliate program I launched and managed for over a year (and just recently transferred the management of it to their in-house team), has won the Best Affiliate Banners award. Congratulations also to Tricia Meyers, Angel Djambazov and ShareASale on winning Best Affiliate, Best Agency, and Best CPS Network respectively.

Some affiliate networks offer ways to advertise your affiliate program to their affiliate base. ShareASale is one of the networks I have most experience with, especially when it comes to these internal affiliate recruitment options. I’ve tried different ShareASale options in the past, and have found two to be of most effectiveness: Featured Program of the Week Option (FPOW), which is currently priced at $450/week, and Holiday Center, which currently costs $75-$100/year depending on how many categories (see your options below) you place your ad in. The latter one is a hugely underused, but a highly effective option which I encourage all ShareASale-based merchants to look into.

We are currently running both some FPOW, and some Holiday Center campaigns for our clients. So, I thought it’d be interesting to analyze how they convert side-by-side.

Featured Program of the Week ads
(conversion range: 25% – 38%)

Holiday Center ads
(conversion range: 55% – 58%)

Conclusions:

1. Do not miss out on the opportunity with the Holiday Center, which yields highly targeted affiliate traffic, resulting in extremely high click-to-signup conversions.
2. When budget allows, do play with the FPOW option too, but make sure there is a time-sensitive incentive interwoven into the copy/idea that goes with your one-week ad. Then your conversions will be higher.

As I was packing for PubCon South 2011 at Austin (8-9 March) — where I will be speaking on the affiliate management components the majority of merchants miss — I told my wife that I should order more business cards soon, as I’m running low on them. My daughter (important: who accompanied me on my travels to three affiliate marketing conferences before) hearing our brief conversation went to her room and draw me a “business card”.

It looks like this:

See that star and “ShareASale” written on me (I assume that is me)? Well, that’s an exemplary case of branding done right, ladies and gentlemen! Even my 7-year-old daughter knows that when we’re talking “Daddy’s conference”, there’s gotta be “ShareASale” somewhere there. …and she is right! They sponsored most of the Affiliate Summits I’ve been too, and they’re also on the list of this PubCon‘s sponsors. Branding done right, no doubt about it.

I’ve noticed this new function in ShareASale‘s merchant interface yesterday morning, but wasn’t exactly sure how new it really was. Then I saw Jared Saunders — affiliate program manager at Jenson USA and holder of ShareASale’s “Exceptional Affiliate Manager” 2009 award — tweet about it:

…and apparently Jared’s right. There seem to be no blog posts about this new feature. So here we go:

ShareASale has recently introduced a new feature which allows merchants (or affiliate program managers) to set personalized commission rules for individual affiliates. Before this merchants could only “make changes” to affiliates’ “commission schedule” setting custom (or private) commissions/payouts:

Now in addition to the above feature ShareASale also allows merchants to tailor affiliate “commission rules” on a different level, choosing to set specific performance conditions and tie additional commission rules to them:

Good to see another improvement (which gives merchants good flexibility) from a major affiliate network.

Less than a week ago in an intro to this post, I blogged how pleasing to my (and I’m sure every affiliate marketer’s) eye it is to see new developments at different affiliate networks. Now, in addition to ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and LinkShare, we have AvantLink with their February news!

Yesterday they announced their very own (and a very robust one too) WordPress plugin. So immediately I have reached out to them to get a better idea of how it works, and how bloggers can/will benefit from this launch. This is how this post was born…

The AvantLink plugin for WordPress basically allows quick and simple integration with a number of the network’s integrated Affiliate tools & scripts. Once the plugin is installed and activated, there are several things to note within your WordPress admin panel.

1. Plugin users will see a “AvantLink WP” link in the admin sidebar, under the “Settings” section. Clicking that link opens the “AvantLink WP Plugin Settings” page, which includes four tabs that allow the configuration of several functions, including a product search engine via the AvantLink API (see image below).

2. Plugin users will see an AvantLink icon in their post editor’s kitchen sink. Clicking the icon will open a dialog box that allows affiliates to select any pre-configured ad type/unit (banner, text, video, etc.), from any merchant the affiliate is active with. It will also allow affiliates to create custom tracking links to any merchant URL they choose (see the two screengrabs below)

3. Plugin users will notice several new AvantLink WP widgets in the “Appearance” area of their WordPress admin. These include

• • AvantLink Product Ad Widget – Easy integration of any AvantLink Product Ad Widget (PAW) subscription that has been configured and saved.
  • AvantLink Product Search Form – Quickly enable an on site product search engine, using data from AvantLink merchants.
  • AvantLink Related Products – Display related products from AvantLink merchants driven by custom keyword searches.

It’s important to note that once the AvantLink WP plugin is installed and activated, an Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) subscription is enabled by default on a site-wide basis. The ALE uses JavaScript to convert direct-to-merchant links to affiliate-tracking links on the fly, and within the end user’s browser. This of course can be deactivated via the settings page, if that’s preferred.

Several integrated tools and scripts from AvantLink offer unique and exclusive functionality free of charge to qualified affiliates, and now WordPress CMS affiliates can easily utilize these ad tools and subscriptions with simple, easy to configure widgets. Very nice development!

It’s great to see affiliate networks developing. Last week ShareASale launched their new merchant interface. A couple days after that Google Affiliate Network announced product APIs for affiliates. Yesterday Shawn Collins wrote about buy.at‘s new product search feature for affiliates. Today I’d like to bring to you another network-related news — LinkShare has just launched a mobile dashboard for affiliates (or “publishers” as they call them).

This morning I’ve had a chance to have a look at their new mobile dashboard. It is not an app, but an actual mobile website, which, as they themselves wrote to me, “allows LinkShare publishers to search, get, and promote links all from a mobile device” (via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr).

Here’s how it works:

1. Copy and paste a token

2. Choose an advertiser

3. Search for a product or coupons from that advertiser

4. Share via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr

Once again it’s a mobile website, and not an app. So basically you can use the same URL on different mobile devices.

And it has finally happened!! An hour ago, today on Tuesday (February 8, 2010), ShareASale launched its brand-new Generation 6 merchant interface, and I surely love both the look and the multiple user-friendly features.

Here is the way it looked just this morning:

And here is the way it looks now:

Here are a couple more close-up snapshots from the new interface:

I’ve already taken note of some things to improve (e.g.: that “pending FTP applications” doesn’t seem to reflect the true situation, and the link to the new user interface could surely be made more obvious in the old interface than the hardly visible “New UI**” link, etc), and will be sending these suggestions to ShareASale right after posting this, but I think this is a huge improvement that has surely been long-awaited.

I also see that in their blog ShareASale has announced “complimentary webinar tours of the newly unveiled” merchant interface.

Now I wonder when the new Affiliate Interface is coming.

Yesterday as I was adding new coupons for a ShareASale-based affiliate program I have noticed a little (but a very significant) addition to one of the fields you can fill out when adding a coupon/deal to the network. They now have a field for special commission to be applied on coupon/deal transactions. The fine print (and an important rule) may have been up there for some time, but I certainly don’t remember seeing it a couple of years ago. Under the special commission field it says (highlighting mine):

So “this commission amount cannot be less than your advertised global commission rate for public offers” and “for private offers, it must not be lower than your designated commission rate for that specific affiliate.” Very important rule!

I couldn’t help but recall Todd Farmer’s “ShareASale is My Network of Choice” post. For affiliates it is extremely important to have such an understanding mediator between them and the merchants.

It isn’t unusual for merchants (including some of the largest online brands) to offer lower commission rates on coupons (or to coupon affiliates). I like what I see ShareASale doing above. If the merchant doesn’t want to offer coupons through affiliates, that’s fine. Institute such a policy, and have your affiliate manager police it. If, however, you do choose to use the affiliate channel to distribute coupons, factor in the commission affiliates will receive into the discount you’re offering, and still pay the full affiliate commission. Kudos to ShareASale for supporting affiliates there.

Yesterday brought an interesting news — Zibaba, a Facebook ecommerce storefront provider, is set to launch their (first one around?) Facebook-based affiliate marketing platform.

The network is scheduled to launch at the end of January 2011. Both merchants and affiliates are gonna be charged to participate (between $20 and $100 a month “depending on their number of Likes and how many products they want to sell”). InsideFacebook.com has more:

Affiliate marketers will be able to choose items from any existing Zibaba merchant, agree to a revenue sharing or CPA system, and sell these products from a storefront on their own Facebook Page.

Page storefronts help brands monetize their Likes. Directing these fans off of Facebook in order to make purchases raises a barrier to conversion…

This is where Zibaba, within its Facebook-based storefronts comes in. Now they’re taking it a step further, seeking to embed the performance marketing model into the process as well. InsideFacebook.com continues:

Similar to affiliate portals outside of Facebook such as ClickBank and ShareASale, merchants offer an incentive to affiliates such as 25% of revenue or $2.00 per lead. Affiliates then leverage their existing Facebook audience or send traffic to their branded storefront through advertising.

For consumers, the storefronts are easy to browse and search. Social features include the ability for users to Like and comment on products, and publish these actions to their stream. If users Like the Page hosting the storefront, they can receive a 10% discount on their purchases.

Here are just a few examples of Zibaba-powered storefronts (aka Z-Shops): Interflora | Deja Vu Cosmetics | Wolverhampton Wanderers FC | Shudoo. At this time Zibaba doesn’t offer a universal shopping cart which would work across different Z-Shops, but adding such a functionality is in the company’s plans.

I remember at least two affiliate marketers (Chelsea Osoling and Sharon Mostyn) predicting a closer affiliate integration with social in 2011, and this is definitely getting us a huge step closer to it. Will affiliates be happy to pay is a big question though. Will we see similar free-for-affiliates platforms/networks springing up soon thereafter? Time will show, but in the meantime we’ll be monitoring how things develop on Zibaba’s front.