Archive for the 'Affiliate Marketing Strategy' Category

Much like all online sales, 4th quarter is traditionally the strongest quarter for software sales online. What this means, is that NOW is the time to get ready to take advantage of an uptick in sales. The easiest way is to add something new to your site. Stuck for ideas on what to add? Here is a brainstorm list of software types. Think about how you can implement these types of software into your site:

Mac Products, New Product Releases, B2B, Webmaster Tools, Music Software, Tech hardware, Security Tools, Software of the Week, Discount Software, Localized/Other countries, Optimizers, Vista-compatible software, Mobile Apps, Games, and IT-focused products. We have the collection of proven software titles ready to go.

One of the neat tools in the oneNetworkDirect affiliate system is the use of the Sub-ID Tracking. If you implement additional links you can track the effectiveness of the links from various points on your site. To implement this tracking simply append an alpha-numeric value to the end of the base URL found in the system. An example here:

http://affiliates.digitalriver.com/z/333/CD4/ is the “base URL”

add an alpha-numeric value like this:

http://affiliates.digitalriver.com/z/333/CD4/frontpage1

“frontpage1″ will show up in your “Reporting” section under “Transaction Reports”. The column with “Affiliate Info” will show this value which allows you to do A/B testing and monitor overall effectiveness. My suggestion is that this becomes a best practice that is used each time you implement new products from the oneNetworkDirect system.

Don’t be complacent. The addition of content to your site will help you out with Google ranking and overall traffic. We can help make product suggestions that are good fits to your site. Contact me and I’d be glad to make some suggestions.

By Denise Purtzer

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Interview: Troy Vertigan, VP Global Reseller Business, PC Tools

DP: Troy, I have had the pleasure of working with you and PC Tools team for over 5 years now. In this time I have seen many changes in the business, and with PC Tools. What is the main reason you attribute to the overall success of your affiliate program?

TV: The key to a successful affiliate program is simply to provide best of breed (top rated & award winning) quality products, along with the right tools to successfully market them. PC Tools flagship product Spyware Doctor, and the popular Registry Mechanic – both have won over 100 awards & reviews, which cements them in the market as best of breed. When the PC Tools’ affiliate program was launched, there were clear objectives in place which have been the catalyst to its success:

• Affiliate partnerships must be win/win – understanding that if we help them grow their business, they grow ours in return.
• Providing affiliates with as much flexibility in promoting our software as they need – for example by having a flexible policy on search terms that affiliates can bid on.
• Rewarding those successful affiliates, by providing higher revenue share for affiliates that drive significant sales.
• Providing special offers such as discount coupon codes to large affiliates to assist with increasing conversion rates.
• Providing pre-approved creative content to affiliates for easy and effective website & email campaign distribution.
• Providing timely responses to affiliate queries (via both phone & e-mail).

DP: Registry Mechanic has sold very well and won many awards in the past, and you just recently launched Desktop Mechanic. What is the main difference between the two products, and what tips can you give to affiliates for successfully marketing this product?

TV: Desktop Mechanic was produced to provide the basic computer user with optimization and cleaning tools that normally only the advanced user knows how to access. It combines the features of both Registry Mechanic and Privacy Guardian and adds other useful computer system optimizing & monitoring tools (such as disk defragmentation, process tasks list etc).

DP: What does PC Tools do to go “above and beyond” in helping their affiliates succeed?

TV: There are a number of key differentiators that the PC Tools’ affiliate program offers its partners:

• Full creative & marketing support - A full media kit to get affiliates started which includes banner ads, text links, images, graphics, and relevant content. Then once the campaign is live we constantly work closely with our affiliate’s to ensure their websites are optimized to produce high conversion rates.
• Timely response rates – We had a global affiliate team at hand ready to respond in real-time to affiliate requests.
• Flexible policy on search marketing – as mentioned previously, apart from the PC Tools trademarked company name and our software titles; affiliates can bid on any search marketing terms.
• Best competitive revenue share/commissions - We offer a competitive base commission rate of 35%, even higher for successful affiliates.

DP: You surpassed the 150 million download mark which puts you in the same class as the other “big dogs” of software. Congratulations on that. By doing so, you have built a household name with PC Tools. How can affiliates work with this to their advantage?

TV: Using the success of our product downloads (over 150 million world-wide) along with reinforcing credibility through our reviews and awards and using our own website content should be part of all our affiliate’s marketing campaigns – these are the ones that convert best.

Post your thoughts

Denise Purtzer
Affiliate Development Manager
oneNetworkDirect

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Getting your start in Email marketing may seem like a daunting prospect, but with some advice and a solid email tool you can create a constant source of income from affiliate marketing.

Before you can be successful with email affiliate marketing you need to define the what, how and who you want to concentrate your marketing efforts on.

When deciding “what” you want to market you will want to look for a product that will both fit well with your target audience’s interests and offer quality html emails that you can use to market to them.

The “how” is referring to your email tool that you will use to send your messages, process opt-outs, collect signups and track open and click rates. Prices for a quality tool vary greatly. Depending on the size of your list you will pay about $15 at the low end for and the most expensive service I could find was $1000 a month for 100,000 contacts. Starting with a service like Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com) will help you create your list and give you advice to help you get started collecting addresses.

That brings me to the who. Your email tool will help you collect addresses with a widget that goes on your webpage but what can you do to get people to join your mailing list? The answer is easy, participate in online events, tradeshows and any other marketing events that you can and be sure that people know that they can go to your site to sign up for your mailing list. Get the word out and you will see traffic to your list increase. The more you have to offer your customer the more likely they are to find and then join your list. Also, make sure you enable the “Send to Friend” technology available with most email tools that lets your customers forward the newsletter to their friends and helps you build your email list even more.

Email marketing is a low risk way to break into the world of affiliate marketing. For a list of the email offers available in oneNetworkDirect login into your account at http://www.onenetworkdirect.com and search for html creative.

Adam Westland
Network Coordinator
oneNetworkDirect

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Ok, so you want to join the user generated content revolution. And rightly so, user-generated content sites are among the fastest growing brands on the internet today, bringing in millions of unique viewers daily. With industry analysts predicting significant continued growth in this sector — estimating the volume of downloads or views on these sites will surpass 65 billion by 2010 — it is no wonder that an overriding theme with many content owners, publishers and advertisers this year will be finding a way to tap into the buzz, and how to make money doing it. Revenues tied to user submitted content are expected to exceed $850 million by 2010, causing traditional companies to take notice of the opportunities available to them and extending their businesses online.

With the advent as tools such as Sonic’s “Easy Media Creator 9″ www.sonic.com now anyone with a camcorder, laptop, and internet connection can make videos and post them to the net. I remember way back in 1994 when I first started playing with video on a computer. We used a $10,000 Pentium 90 with a whole one gig SCSI Barracuda hard drive and we made a postage stamp size piece of video run, wow! That was huge. Now, sites like www.youtube.com, www.break.com, www.blip.tv, and a plethora of sites are the launching pads for the next big thing.

A perfect example of corporate America cashing in on User Generated content is Heinz 57 Ketchup, yep the Ketchup giant is waging a marketing campaign to find the next great commercial. The winner, according to the viewer’s votes wins $57,000 and their ad runs on national TV!

http://www.topthistv.com/

User-submitted content sites are the new resources of entertainment and information. For publishers, these new outlets represent the next generation of web technologies that can be monetized. Once you establish brand loyalty, you will find you have a viable media product that advertisers will pay for. What does this all mean? is Americas best and brightest advertising agencies losing it? Or is this the future of advertising? Time will tell, but in the mean time, grab your camcorder, laptop, a copy of Sonic’s Easy Media Creator 9 and think about that Ketchup commercial your going to air-

Sean Hendrickson
Manager, Affiliate Marketing
oneNetworkDirect

References: iMediaPublished: February 27, 2007 Connection, Heinz 57 Ketchup

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A study from Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions and MetrixLab revealed that 70% of Americans ages 15-34 are actively participating in social networking sites. Just as social networking sites have provided a new way for friends to gather and meet, marketers are also offered a new advertising channel. A definitive answer to generating revenue on these sites has yet to be answered, but may lie with the users themselves. The Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions and MetrixLab study also revealed that 64% of social networkers trust information from ‘friends’ and will visit sites after learning of them/ receiving ‘word of mouth’ advertising. If you visited a ‘friends’ page on a social network and saw an ad or reference to a product or service, chances are you would be more likely to click and explore that advertiser. The opportunity exists to advertise to individual users and/or groups that are highly targeted.

Nevertheless, advertising on social networking sites can also be tricky, and marketers need to take strategic and creative approaches. The audiences skew younger, and often these younger audiences are exceptionally adept at tuning out traditional advertising – therefore pushing ads no longer works. Marketers wanting to use social networks need to get creative. In addition to advertisements and sponsorships, marketers know that the buzz generated on social networks is much more of a powerful endorsement than any form of promotion. In fact, word of mouth is widely considered the most powerful form of marketing and the wave of the future for influencing sales. According to a December 2005 McKinsey report, approximately two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service. The advantage of social networking for marketers is that it does not involve interrupting like an advertisement does.

Amanda Swenson
Manager, Affiliate Marketing
oneNetworkDirect

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With Uniblue you can sign-up, relax and go on holiday. However, this time Uniblue might even pay for your holiday!

How?

Sign-up to the Uniblue Affiliate Program today and start selling our products before September 30th 2007. If you manage to be the top-seller amongst the new sign-ups you will win an all-inclusive vacation for 2 persons in the sunny island of Malta, Europe!

Prize includes:

• Two flight tickets from anywhere in the United States to Malta, including airport tax
• 7 nights accommodation for two persons in a 5-star hotel in Malta
• Transfers from Malta airport to hotel and from hotel to Malta airport

For more information about Malta, visit: www.visitmalta.com

*Conditions and Restrictions: Valid months to travel: May/June 2008, and October/November 2008.

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Starting from June Acronis, Inc. has a new affiliate program with incentive commission structure. Acronis Affiliate base commission payout is 25% with successful affiliates earning up to 50% commission.

Every affiliate now has a personal affiliate manager, who is always ready to send additional promotional materials and answer all questions.

Acronis Affiliate Program is among the featured programs in oneNetworkDirect.

We have increased commissions for some our affiliates in June and we are looking for new affiliates who are ready to earn high commissions with award-winning Acronis products!

If you have any questions please contact us at affiliates@acronis.com

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So now you have all of your offers ready, the offers posted and are getting traffic, however you are not seeing the results you had hoped…why is this? Have you ever looked around the web to make sure you have a compelling offer?

Often times when you are pulling offers from newsletters, data feeds, or the affiliate interface you are getting the same offer that is available to everyone who is an affiliate of the network. Depending on how big the network is, this offer could be heavily promoted and diluted. It’s always wise to do your homework before you start promoting a coupon to see how the offer competes in the market and determine how wide-spread the offer is…the last thing you want is to be just another affiliate promoting the same stale offer.

The Holy Grail of coupon affiliates is the coveted “exclusive”. “Exclusive Offer” is also one of the most over-used, thrown-through-the-mud, and abused terms in the industry. One of my favorite explanations is “Well, it’s exclusive to our network”. Sure it is, but you also have 100,000+ affiliates in your network…that doesn’t sound very exclusive to me!

So how do you know your “exclusive” is truly exclusive? Depending on what kind of exclusive offer it is, there are websites out there that can help you check. If you have an exclusive offer that is the lowest price, I recommend checking www.froogle.com and www.pricegrabber.com. Froogle.com is still in Beta, so it can be a little challenging to navigate sometimes, but between the two sites you can typically determine if you have the lowest price. If you are running with multi-product bundles, conducting a few simple Google searches should quickly tell you if your exclusive bundle is available elsewhere.

One thing that is often overlooked with exclusive offers is the automatic assumption that it has to be the lowest price. Does it? Not necessarily. Depending on the product and the network you are working with, you can get exclusive “bundles” of multiple products from the same merchant or even multiple merchants. The key is finding the right product mix and the right discount level for multiple products. One advantage of exclusive product bundles is that you increase your AOV (Average Order Value). I don’t know about you, but I would rather have a few high AOV sales in a month rather than have to rely purely volume.

Rick Gardiner
Manager, Affiliate Development LEC
oneNetworkDirect

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What are some of the challenges facing coupon affiliates today? Well, for starters:

• Finding and maintaining the most current offers for each of your programs.
• Driving potential customers to these offers/exposure.
• Making sure that you have a compelling offer.
• Determining who your target market/audience is, and then effectively marketing to them.

There of course are other challenges that coupon affiliates face, but I would like to focus in and talk about different strategies, ideas, and thoughts that I have found to work with several coupon affiliates. This is not going to be a “how to get rich by starting a coupon site” article or me sharing proprietary information from specific coupon sites. What I do hope to do is shed some light on helpful tips/tricks/tools that can make your life easier…and maybe even help you generate more sales.

So how do you find and maintain the most current offers for each of your programs? Well, you can start by spending hours upon hours trying to dig for coupons and links in the affiliate interface of every network you are part of (not fun, FYI). If you’re a little “tech-savvy” (and the network provides this), you can pull an RSS or data-feed that will send you all of the current promotions and offers. Finally, if you are fortunate enough to have an affiliate manager you work with, they can help you compile and consolidate all of the offers and deliver them to your inbox.

What’s the best option? I am a big believer in personal relationships in the industry, so I prefer working with the human element. There is an article written by Ian Larsen that is posted on Digital Moses on how to effectively distribute coupons to affiliates. His format was a significant influence in the coupon management tool I built and use daily with the affiliates I work with. The key is consolidating the offer description, start/expiration date, coupon code (if needed), and affiliate links in an easy-to-use format that affiliates can upload into their website. Affiliate feedback on this tool has been amazing, and affiliates have now been able to easily manage all of the current offers available and work with an actual person (me) instead of a data feed.

Do 30 day offers work better than offers that are good for 60-90 days? A derivative topic of “Finding and Maintaining current offers” is determining what length of offer works best. There are many factors involved, however a key component is based on how you’re driving traffic to the offer. If you are driving traffic using paid search, you can promote ads on the search engines that will quickly increase your traffic and sales. This is great for short term offers. If you rely heavily on natural or “organic” search results, you rely on being indexed by the search engines which takes time. You will find having offers that include relevant content around the offer and that run for 60-90+ days work best.

Can you do both? You can supplement your natural search results by creating paid search ads that drive traffic to the offer via an interstitial page on your website that provides key features, product description, and other relevant information. If you build solid content that gets indexed by the search engines AND supplementing your natural search by also driving traffic via PPC ads, you get the best of both worlds and are not relying heavily on one or the other. Just like investing, it is wise to “diversify” how you drive traffic to your offer. The bottom line is that if a consumer is out looking for coupon offers, they are 90% sold on the product and now looking for the best deal. If you can provide a compelling offer and provide great content you will bridge that 10% gap and increase your close-ratio/conversion rate ultimately generating more sales.

Post your thoughts!

Rick Gardiner
Manager, Affiliate Development LEC
oneNetworkDirect

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Reference: “The Critical Coupon Code Step” by Ian Larsen: http://www.dmconfidential.com/blogs/column/Affiliate_Marketing_Tips/534/

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oneNetwork has developed a getting started guide that affiliates can download at

http://onenetwork.digitalriver.com/info/oneNetwork_Fundamentals.pdf.

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