The October 30 affiliate.com Newsletter is now available online.

The affiliate.com crew is getting ready to leave the winter wonderland of Denver for the Big Apple next week to attend ad:tech New York.  This is always one of the best conferences of the year and we’re excited for the show’s big move to the Javits Center.  While the old venue at the Hilton was convenient, the show had definitely outgrown the facility.  This year, all the booths will be in one large exhibit hall, rather than split up over three floors, with some unlucky exhibitors in back corners and hallways.

If you are going to be in New York for the show, be sure to stop by our booth (#1212) and check out the latest affiliate.com promotional t-shirt.  We have limited quantities to give out, so make us one of your first stops when you get to the show.  Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker just featured the shirt on his blog today.  Check it out!

We will be sending our usual large contingent of Affiliate Managers and Advertising Account Execs to the show, including Doug Davis, Andrea Castaneda, Jason Jugert, Jazette Pester, Laura Nielsen, Brian Chase, Brittany Bankston, Jen Conlon, and Andrea Jantzen.  Everyone on the team will be at the booth regularly, so swing by and say hello.

We hope to see you in the Big Apple next week!

It’s always interesting to watch a marketer think outside the box, utilize non-traditional methods and hit a marketing grand slam.  It can be a great motivator for marketers as they see someone else take a chance and achieve some serious success. While it isn’t in the affiliate marketing space, a recent marketing campaign for a new Hollywood movie is the latest example of someone turning the tried-and-true marketing establishment on its ear.

If you happened to catch the entertainment and movie news from the weekend, you may have noticed that a movie called Paranormal Activity was #1 at the box office.  The movie stands out from normal Hollywood fare for a number of reasons.  Number one - it was made by a virtually unknown director for approximately $11,000.  A large studio bought the movie, with possible plans to re-shoot the story with some big name actors and a big budget.  Those plans were changed and the film was released with a few minor tweaks.  The studio provided a truly minimal promotion budget, forcing the movie’s marketing team to come up with some innovative ways to get the movie in front of a small, but potentially vocal target audience and then encourage them to recommend the movie to their friends.

The movie was initially given limited screenings in a few college towns and promoted somewhat like The Blair Witch Project, in that it could be seen as a “true” story, rather than a Hollywood blockbuster.  Audiences reacted exactly as hoped and told their friends about the film.  The marketing team then utilized social media to let the audience mobilize and begin demanding that the movie be released in their towns.  The rest is movie marketing history in the making, as the film has earned over $62 million since its initial limited release.

Obviously, the clever marketing wouldn’t have done much good, if the movie hadn’t resonated with audiences.  But, it still stands out as an unbelievably successful use of so-called “non-traditional” media to connect with an audience in ways that most movies never aspire to.

As affiliate marketers, we aren’t generally involved in movie marketing (although I can certainly see performance-based marketing playing a role in online ticket sales) but, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some great lessons to be learned from this campaign.  The beauty of this type of word-of-mouth and social media marketing is that if it is done well, the audiences does most of the heavy lifting.  The marketer’s main goal is to do their best to support and facilitate the group, as it caries out the majority of the actual promotion.

Think about ways that you can leverage social media or other innovative methods to drive traffic to your websites and offers.   Not every outside the box idea will end up being a success, but you just might hit on one that will help you rise above the competition.

Fail quickly.  Any successful online marketer will tell you that many of your campaigns and tests won’t be profitable.  This is especially true in PPC.  One of the keys to long term success is to quickly determine if a campaign isn’t working they way you expect and move on.

One of the biggest advantages of online marketing is that you can run a test and get results very quickly.  Be highly efficient in setting up and monitoring your tests.  Evaluate results as quickly as possible and make decisions to cut off tests that aren’t performing.

The October 27 affiliate.com Newsletter is now available online.

While you may not want to worry about putting campaigns on every search engine out there, be sure to keep the top few (3 or 4) in mind when planning out your search initiatives.  You just may find that by extending your campaigns onto a few other search engines will bring in a nice stream of incremental revenue.

We have developed a new feature for viewing offers in the affiliate.com system that allows Publishers to see all active campaigns, including those which were set as “Private” which we now call “Select.”  The option allows every Publisher to view campaign landing pages, read campaign descriptions and gives you the ability to apply for permission to run these Select campaigns.

To search for offers in the system, type in a keyword in the text field.  (You can also run a category search by clicking on Offers by Category from the Offers menu.)  The system will return a group of offers based on your search parameters.  Here, you will be able to view the payout, EPC, and campaign description for each offer.  Clicking on the campaign name will bring you to the campaign’s description page.  This will let you know if the campaign is a Select offer or a Public offer.  If it is a Select offer that accepts your marketing traffic (Email, Search, etc.) and you wish to run the campaign, simply click on the “Apply” button to request permission to promote the offer.  To help expedite the approval process, contact your Affiliate Manager with information regarding the type of traffic you wish to send and any other information that may be useful in the application process.

We are in the process of making a number of additional changes to our system to further promote transparency and improve the value and overall user-experience of our system.  Future additions will include a quick links section to commonly used reports, links to our newest offers each day, a revenue chart, and a number of other improvements.  There will also be a section where your Affiliate Manager can post their top offers of the week, marketing tips, notes, news, and other useful information.

I encourage you to log in and check out these changes as they are rolled out over the upcoming weeks.  Please contact your Affiliate Manager with any comments or questions.

The October 23, 2009 affiliate.com newsletter is now available online.

As you design landing pages and other sites, make sure you test them on all of the top browsers.  You may be surprised when a site that works perfectly on one browser seems to have issues on another.

Making sure your sites work in all the major browsers, will help you optimize your overall conversion rate.

by Tom Wozniak, Director of Marketing

Last week, many web surfers and TV viewers were glued to their screens as they watched a flying saucer shaped balloon floating thousands of feet above the eastern Colorado plains.  In case you missed it, here is a quick summary of the event.  A weird looking, saucer shaped, experimental weather balloon is tied down in a family’s back yard.  Balloon is released and floats up to the sky.  6 year old reports seeing brother (appropriately named Falcon) get into the balloon basket before it took off.  Intense media coverage begins and news crews spend the next few hours videotaping the balloon float around in the sky.  Emergency personnel follow the balloon from the ground.  Millions of people tune in via TV and the web to watch the story unfold.  The balloon eventually makes a relatively graceful landing in a field.  Local authorities converge and discover the balloon and basket are empty.  A search for the missing little boy commences.  The boy is found hiding in his parents’ attic, unharmed.  He was, in fact, never in the balloon.  The world releases a collective sigh of relief, wonders why it just spent hours watching a balloon float around in the air and realizes that these wasted hours are gone forever.  This is followed by days of speculation on whether the entire thing was a hoax or just an innocent child’s mistake.

So, what does this odd media episode have to do with marketing?  Not long after the balloon was spotted by the media and coverage began, a do-it-yourself t-shirt site began featuring a shirt with a crudely drawn image of the balloon and the words “Go Falcon Go.”  Now, we’re not going to get into a discussion of whether designing and promoting such a shirt was appropriate, given the situation at the time.  Instead, let’s just consider how quickly an individual was able to design a product that capitalized on a current/ongoing event and make it available to a worldwide market.  We are literally talking about an hour (give or take a few minutes).

Products have been created in advance of major news events before, but usually for events with a limited number of potential outcomes.  (Apparel for championship sports teams, buttons and other paraphernalia for election winners, etc.)  In these cases it was generally known in advance that the outcome would be announced on a particular date (and during a fairly specific window of time), so the items could be created in advance to cover just about any foreseeable outcome.  The ones that turned out to be incorrect would simply be destroyed, donated to charity, or become odd collector’s items.  In last week’s situation, it was a completely unforeseeable event.  So, nothing could be designed or planned in advance.

The internet has created the possibility for nearly real-time product development and marketing for certain types of products.  Prior to the internet, someone could have seen an event unfolding on TV, designed a product (t-shirt, hat, button, poster, etc.) and maybe even had it printed relatively quickly.  But, there would have been no easy way to promote your new item to more than a handful of people (friends, neighbors, etc.).  The internet makes it possible to take that product and promote it to potentially millions of people in nearly real-time (through email, social media, etc.).

Of course this situation doesn’t apply to every kind of product under the sun.  The planning and design have to be fairly simple and there needs to be a mechanism to get the products created in an appropriate amount of time.  But, we have ushered in an era where innovative entrepreneurs can create and market a product with unprecedented speed.

This is also a great lesson for affiliates and other online marketers.  When some unforeseen event captures the attention of millions of people, what can you do to leverage all that interest?  Is there a way to create new landing pages or other creative that will capitalize on the media coverage?  Can you create a new offer or make a connection with a current one that relates to the event?  While you can’t count on these types of situations to consistently grow your business, finding ways to act on them quickly can definitely boost your bottom line.