That was before smartphones came along. Blackberry brought in the era of hand-held email, particularly for business users. But Apple’s iPhone has created a new and robust mobile advertising marketplace. (Never mind the kazillion apps, which is a burgeoning marketing opportunity in and of itself.)

Now, with the introduction of more new smartphones like the Palm Pre and the recently launched Android, built around Google’s operating system, mobile advertising promises to become strategically important.

A recent Gartner Group report put worldwide mobile ad spending for 2009 at a little over $910 million – not huge in the greater scheme of things, but a whopping 74 percent increase over the previous year. Gartner said worldwide mobile ad spending would exceed $13 billion by 2013, led by the Asia-Pacific region and followed by North America and Europe, according to Online Media Daily.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s A Mobile Advertising Overview, while somewhat dated (July 2008), is a document worth reviewing. According to this overview, even two years ago, the active audience for text messaging was over 100 million, and for mobile web it was over 34 million. (As a matter of context, the iPhone was introduced in June 2007; the data reported was as of November 2007.)

The overview quotes the 2008 Pew Internet Life study, indicating the following percentages for individuals with a mobile phone using one or more mobile data services: 96 percent of 18-29 year olds; 85 percent of 30-49 year olds, 63 percent of 50-64 year olds, and 36 percent of Americans older than age 65. I was surprised at the relatively high percentages for individuals 50 and over. It bodes well for mobile marketers.

The IAB defines mobile advertising as having two major forms: “display ads delivered on the device itself (within a mobile Web browser or some other phone-based application), or display ads in other media that feature a mobile call-to-action (typically sending a message via text messaging shortcode).” On-device ads include text ads, banner ads, and video. Common off-device usage of mobile advertising includes mobile coupons to drive purchase at a retail outlet, mobile PINs to drive traffic to a web page, and mobile ticketing for events. Not surprisingly, major advertisers routinely include mobile advertising as a component of integrated campaigns.

The IAB Overview includes this sub-head at the end of the document, “The iPhone: Smarter phones drive even greater usage.” In July 2008, IAB refers to the iPhone as “the future.” Things have moved quickly: The future is here. Online advertisers need to embrace it, and start making the move to mobile advertising.

When asked “Where have you encountered the greatest resistance to social media in your organization?” the two leading responses were (not surprisingly) the president/business owner (21 percent) and senior management (20 percent). Of those readers that “successfully overcame resistance to using social media” at their place of business, more than half of them said they “just did it, and served as the role model themselves.”

Chris Brogan, author of the new best-selling book Trust Agents, suggests
it may require more than “just doing it,” however. He thinks it takes good arguments about improving the company’s communications and bottom line, not simply espousing the coolness of social media. He recommends sharing relevant case studies to prove that other businesses are getting legitimate results from using social media. It wouldn’t hurt to get a member of senior management to be a cheerleader, either.

“It’s just a matter of finding the right opportunity to recommend that your company is ready to play in the game,” Brogan says. “It might mean finding your top competitor already using the tools, but hey, that’s won several social media enthusiasts the chance to get things going.”

In an interview with SmartBrief on Social Media, marketing expert Valeria Maltoni, who writes the ConversationAgent blog, reinforces Brogan’s points, saying it’s crucial to “speak the language of business when describing social media” and “focus on the opportunities that exist in the marketplace.” The three most common mistakes Maltoni sees in pitching social media to senior management are not tying the strategy into business goals, lack of insight into where social media can be integrated into the company’s business strategy, and poor execution capabilities.

Maltoni says that entrepreneurs tend to immediately understand the benefits of social media: “They get it, they know they can use the tools to amplify their off-line activities and scale their own presence and participation in customer communities.” Large organizations, on the other hand, may be more resistant because they are “more siloed and less organic.”

The bottom line seems to be that for business leaders to embrace social media, they’ll need to hear a compelling business argument that includes some justification for ROI.

It’s no secret that CPMs and CTRs aren’t what they used to be. And while part of this is banner blindness, and part of it is the economy, I think the biggest contributor is the habits of end-users plus basic human psychology.

You see, the nature of the web is that it gives us on-demand content, so we end up not noticing the content we’re not looking for. But more importantly, we distrust online ads because they run counter to the experience that draws us online in the first place. I go online to get what I want when I want it, and I never really want advertising. As Douglas Haddow put it:

“Unlike the television viewer, the Internet user has been conditioned to distrust online advertising from the beginning, due to its association with viruses and overall desktop dysfunction.”

And this is even truer with social media, where users log-on to interact with other users, and where a lot of the content consumed is user-generated — by their personal network.

Right now, there aren’t many options for targeting ads. You target them according to either a user’s search query, keywords on a page, or based on what you think a site’s audience might be. All of these methods share the assumption that third-party content can be used to accurately target a user. And the problem with such an assumption is that third-party content doesn’t say anything about the audience; it can only tell you about the publisher.

And publishers have a different mandate than advertisers. Their mandate is to keep their audience happy, and advertising doesn’t do that. But as long as they keep getting page views, they can sell ad space and stay in business.

The result is that ad spots sell for less than they could because advertisers never know when an impression or click is going to be a dud. So the only way to sell that space is to price it at a low enough rate that it offsets the advertiser’s uncertainty. The result is that publishers make less money than they could, and advertisers get fewer results.

This is where cloudvertising comes in. Cloudvertising is an extension of cloud computing, and social media is a big part of what makes up the cloud. What social media contributes to the cloud is data — data about users, by users.

And rather than leaving advertiser to guess what demographic might be interested in their product and who it is they actually end up targeting, this user-generated-data can used to turn things around and let users target them.

You see, user activity “in the cloud” all comes down to user-generated-content: they’re uploading and sharing content continuously, whether it’s vacation slides, bookmarks, or conversations. And this content tells us more about a user than any demographic analysis. It tells us about their actual interests and even what happens to be on their mind.

So user-generated-content becomes user-generated-data, and that data is much more personalized than any other data-set available. Cloudvertising is about indexing and mining all this user-generated-data, and then using that data to target users with ads that will actually appeal to them, and then convert.

So what would a cloudvertising platform do, exactly?

Well, it would do four important things:

• First, it would support all popular online ad models (CPM, CPC, and CPA)
• Second, it would be integrated with social media APIs (Tweet this, Digg this, etc.)
• Third, it would refer back to all your social networking content (wall posts, tweets, etc.), indexed it, determine your interests, and profile you.
• Then, it would show you ads that you might actually (1) be interested in and (2) act on.

If there happens to be no CPM advertisers in the system that fit your profile it might show you a CPA offer that appeals to you. So the advertiser doesn’t squander an impression, and the publisher still has a chance of making a commission from an ad that has a high likelihood of converting.
The root problem facing publishers isn’t so much falling ad revenues, but that ad technology hasn’t yet caught up with content technology. Once it does, both publishers and advertisers will be better off because there’ll be less uncertainty, fewer inefficiencies, and market ad rates will actually reflect full potential value of the ad space.

The resources for a new ad technology are there: they’re social media and all the user-generated-data produced through it. It’s really just a matter of time before one of the big guys, like Google or Facebook, rolls out something like it. Such technology may be the life preserver many publishers today need to stay afloat.

The question is with the advent of such new technology will overcome the filters the target audience has developed or whether human psyche will simply adapt more advanced forms of banner blindness?

Years past the trip through the show floor for goodies yielded a plethora of cool, weird, and boring items (SF2007, SF 2007, NY 2008) to tempt you to stop by the booth.  This year there were a few worthwhile things like the purple octopus, but it was mostly pens and handouts.

It looked like there were a ton of parties (eight Tuesday night that I knew of), but very few were open bar.  In the past, every party I was invited to (and as press I get invited to most) was open bar. Companies are still spending the money to get their name out there and make a splash, but they seemingly can’t afford the extra outlay for the alcohol. Not all parties were cash.  The beer was flowing freely in the Beer Garden at the Affiliate Summit Networking party Tuesday evening.

There were some positives. ad:tech added a new part of the show called ADSPACE, dedicated to “contextual advertising.” I have to put it in quotes because there were a number of sessions that lightly touched on contextual ads and got into ad serving, performance marketing, metrics, affiliate programs, etc.

One session was titled “Beyond Text Ads: In Text, Affiliate, Led-Gen, eBay and More!”  This alone shows that ad:tech is expanding and growing into a show that covers all the ways people monetize their sites.  The performance based industry was well represented and every mention I heard talked about how the ROI was superior to other channels.  There was some great discussion on tracking multiple channels and that dollars are being shifted to the channel because it is measurable and performs so well. Real issues such as fraud were brought up, but it was discussed rationally and affiliates were not painted negatively with a broad brush.

I think the addition of the new ADSPACE track and exhibit area was a great idea and will help improve ad:tech as well as the performance marketing industry as a whole.

Of course, as more and more content inevitably moves online, newspapers should be focusing on increasing online ad revenues and online subscriptions. To do that, they have to increase both traffic, i.e. the number of unique visits and page views. By following the example of where the more successful web portals are now and where some of the more popular emerging portals are headed, they just might be able to that.

In a word, newspapers should be considering how to use social media and mobile technology to hyper-target both ads and content. In doing so, they’ll be able to open up their ad space to both advertisers from around the world/web, and mom & pop business that could never before afford newspaper ad space.

Localized Ads

Newspaper know more about their paying subscribers than just their IP. They have a billing address. Between the two, then, they can show ads for businesses in specific neighborhood.

This, in turn, means they can open up a variety of specialty ad rates that will make it affordable for mom & pop businesses to advertise “in the paper.” Since newspapers know exactly how many people in any given neighborhood subscribe to the paper and what content they interact with the most, they can target the audience accordingly.

A Social News Organization

Newspapers need to consider building community around their subscribers for two reasons: (1) traffic/page views, and (2) user-data — which we’ll get into below. This means integrating the usual suite of social media features such as user profiles, comments, sharing features, and leveraging APIs.

First, letting users interact through profiles and comments can help page views go up. Secondly, allowing readers to easily share content with their personal network by leveraging APIs, such as Twitter and Facebook, should also help increase engagement. Most importantly, however, will be the user data amassed through subscribers’ profiles.

Hyper-Targeted Affiliate Offers

In addition to the profile information that users would provide, newspapers will amass extensive data on its users, including content preferences and online behavior patterns. In conjunction with the data they have on subscribers’ locality and its average demographic, such information would be invaluable in identifying the specific kinds of product offers of interest to their readers.

Imagine if newspapers used this data to leveraged the eBay and Amazon APIs to show users offers they were actually interested in. Users would respond well to the ads, and instead of relying online on impressions, newspapers could monetize and CTRs and even conversions — as any other content-driven super-affiliate does.

Going Mobile

Former Financial Times journalist, Tom Foremski, recently pointed out that papers are already thinking in terms of “mobile journalists equipped with notebooks, cell phone modems, and cameras,” so the next step is to think in terms of mobile subscribers — not mobile readers, but mobile subscribers.

The first step would be sending readers mobile alerts on topics they want. Not only would this increase engagement and offer more value on subscription fees, this would also boost impressions. As mobile readers click through on an SMS to view the story, papers further increase page views, and therefore impressions.

And to build on localized ads, newspapers could leverage location based services (LBS) technology to show mobile subscribers ads that are relevant to their current location. For example, a mom & pop restaurant could reach out to a mobile user who is not from that neighborhood, but happens to be in it.

A Watchdog Business

Newspapers are in the business of (1) providing authoritative information so that they can (2) sell subscriptions and ads. But they are also much more than mere content publishers. They play an important role in a healthy democracy. There is a lot more hinging on their survival, then, than mere jobs and tradition.

Web technologies can help them better distribute their content, so they simply need to adapt their subscription and ad models to these new channels. Granted, the development of that kind of platform would be not be a simple feat; but whoever managed to pull it off well would be in a position not only to make considerable profits, but save a dying but important industry and democratic institution.

Well, there’s actually a lot that goes into crafting an effective product review. It’s a careful balance of urging the reader to buy without appearing to be too sales oriented. So, how do you pull it off? Follow these steps to write product reviews that both inform and motivate readers.

1. Find a product that motivates you- Sure, you can write reviews on virtually any product out there and make money. However, I’ve found it’s much easier to write an effective review when it’s about a product I’m truly passionate about. Passion for the product will come across in your review, and it will help motivate your readers to take action. Make a list of your interests and your favorite products; then go from there.
2. Perform keyword research- Of course, if no one reads your review, what’s the point? That’s why optimizing your product reviews is a must. Brainstorming is the best way to start your keyword research. Write a list of all the phrases people might search for if they’re looking for more information on the product. Then, enter these keywords in a keyword suggestion tool, and determine which phrases will bring you the most traffic.
3. Know your $*!#- The whole idea behind a product review is that the person reviewing it has used the product and knows a lot about it. So, take your time to do detailed research on the product. The last thing you need is to distribute misinformation to your readers. This can cause irreparable damage to your credibility. Know your $*!#.
4. Spend extra time on the headline- Now we’re starting to get into the copywriting side of things. And when you talk about copywriting, it all starts with the headline. Don’t just use the typical dull “(Product name) Review.” Borrrrrrrrrrring. Instead, think of a headline that just begs someone to click on it. Bold questions often work well, e.g. “Is (Product name) a Scam or the Real Deal?” When it comes to writing headlines, the bottom line is this—there is an unlimited amount of information available online; the only way to stand apart in a crowded search engine is to create click-worthy headlines.
5. Focus on the benefits- Features are the technical aspects of a product that make it different from the competition. Benefits explain how those features will benefit the consumer. Case in point—one feature of an iPod might be that it can store up to 120 GB. The benefit of that is the user has more than enough room for their entire music, video, and photo libraries, allowing them to be entertained wherever they go. When writing your review, focus on the benefits instead of the features. Consumers are selfish. They only care how they will benefit from buying a product. Deliver the benefits effectively, and your readers will turn into customers.
6. Build trust through statistics- The effectiveness of your product review depends directly on  your readers’ trust in you. Without it,  your review means nothing to them. So, how do you build trust with random website visitors? Statistics and testimonials are great tools for building trust. When you do your research on a product, see if you can find any case studies demonstrating its effectiveness. The more proof you have that the product works the likelier it is your reader will buy it.
7. Make it scanner-friendly- By now, you’ve probably seen the heat maps depicting how people read web content. To summarize, online users tend to scan content rather than fully read it. What does this mean for you? It means your product reviews need to accommodate their scanning needs. You can do this by writing short paragraphs, using bullet points, bolding important phrases throughout the review, and using white space.
8. Include pictures- People want to see the product they’re reading about and thinking of buying. Include at least one good picture of the product in your review.
9. Finish strong- Product reviews don’t have the typical call-to-action that you find in most sales-driven copywriting. This is because they aren’t meant to deliver hard sell language. However, your conclusion still needs to motivate the reader to take action. The best way to do this is by giving a solid endorsement at the end that conveys just how beneficial this product is to their needs. Remember, it’s all about maintaining a balance between selling and appearing unbiased.

How many of these tips do you follow when writing your affiliate reviews? What would you add to the list?

The Problem with Conventional Ads

Conventional display advertising has never really been an option for Twitter. Aside from the usual challenges such as banner-blindness, display ads would fail to capitalize on the mobile/SMS opportunity that Twitter represents. This leads, in turn, to the idea of Tweet Ads: 140 character text ads.

Of course, even a Tweet Ad model poses some problems for the integrity of the micro-blogging network:

1. On what basis are users targeted to receive ads?
2. Will users be able to opt-out the same way they can choose not follow someone and can they receive mobile updates from someone they do follow?
3. Will ads be targeted according to content, replies, or in the case of an SMS,  location?

If Twitter doesn’t handle it just right, they could risk having either their users or their advertisers walking out on them.

An SMS Service Provider

Since Twitter’s true marketing potential is tied in with its SMS functionality, perhaps its revenue potential is tied in not with its community or content, but with its software. In other words, perhaps Twitter’s go-to-market strategy shouldn’t be as a marketing channel, but as a solutions provider for brands that need to their own turn-key SMS channel.

As mobile proliferates on both the web and SMS fronts, businesses of all sizes   will begin to reach out to customers using SMS delivery solutions. Partly because it already has most of the infrastructure in place, but especially because it’s entered the mainstream, Twitter is in an excellent position to fill that role.

Imagine that you’re on the site for your favorite bar and grill and there’s a button to receive SMS updates about their specials, promotions, and upcoming events. You click on it and land on a co-branded Twitter page. If you’re already a Twitter user you sign in and automatically start following your favorite clubs, restaurants and night spots with mobile updates activated. If you’re not already a user, on that same co-branded landing page you register and soon you’re following your favorite spot  with mobile updates activated.

Because Twitter has entered the mainstream, consumers are familiar with the brand and are more likely to trust it.  That puts Twitter in an excelling position to provide this kind of service. Pricing for this kind of service could be based on the number of subscribers making it affordable for businesses of all sizes.

For enterprise level clients with multiple franchises, there could even be the opportunity to geo-target users when they travel. By integrating location-based service (LBS) technology with the Twitter API, users could receive updates from the nearest franchise. This enterprise level of custom functionality would allow Twitter to develop tiered pricing customized for each customer’s needs and budget.

Tweet, Tweet, Bling, Bling…

Shortly after Twitter launched, it had to suspend SMS service while it wrestled with scaling issues. Although SMS service has been restored in major English speaking markets such the US and UK, it remains suspended in some regions, such as Canada. This focus on prioritizing SMS markets (e.g. the US and UK) reflects that the company is very conscious of its SMS potential. That being said, they have been focused on providing this level of SMS service since their inception. Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan-out for the top-tier micro-blogging service.

•    Linking Only to Your Home Page- One of the most common mistakes I see when examining back links is finding every link pointing to the same page. Most of the time, these links are always to the home page, but this rule applies to any single page. You don’t want every inbound link aimed at the same page. Why? There are several reasons. Most importantly, it doesn’t look natural to the search engines. Second, it doesn’t help you improve your rankings for the long-tail keywords, the bread and butter of search traffic, on the deeper pages of your site. Third, it’s terrible for usability. People want to go directly to the information they need. Making them land on your home page before finding what they want will lead to a high bounce rate.

•    Not Getting Links Consistently Over Time- This happens a lot with new websites. They get a ton of links right off the bat, and then they never get another. Again, this doesn’t look natural to the search engines. Link building isn’t a one-time process; it’s something that takes a long-term commitment. The best way to consistently get inbound links over time is to focus on publishing quality content that begs to be linked to. They don’t say “content is king” for nothing.

•    Not Linking Out- It’s one of my pet peeves—the idea that you can’t risk losing any of your “link juice” by linking out to another website. Or even worse, that if you link out to another website, your visitors won’t come back. Both of these notions are flat out ridiculous. Linking out is important because it helps you build relationships with others since blogs typically ping the webmaster when there’s a new inbound link, it enhances the user experience by assuming the link is relevant and adds insight, and it establishes your blog as a leading resource when you put all the info people need in one place. And if you provide great content, you don’t have to worry about your readers coming back.

•    Always Using the Same Anchor Text- Occasionally, situations will arise where you will have control over what anchor text you want in your back link. Obviously, you want the anchor text to include relevant keywords for search engine placement purposes. However, don’t fall into the trap of using the same anchor text every time. Quite simply, it doesn’t look natural if every link pointing to your website says the same thing word for word. Don’t give the search engines any reason to suspect you’re involved in shady link building practices.

•    Completely Ignoring Reciprocal Links- Every so-called SEO guru out there preaches against getting reciprocal links for your website. The reason for this is that reciprocal links essentially cancel each other out in the eyes of the search engines. But if these “gurus” could stop worrying about pleasing the search engines for a second, they’d see there are benefits to occasionally engaging in reciprocal linking. It can generate highly relevant traffic to your website, and it helps you build a relationship with the other linker that could prove profitable down the line with guest blogging opportunities, referrals, etc. Plus, it improves the user-experience, assuming the link is to a relevant site.) Remember, it’s not always about the search engines; humans count too.

•    Trying to Push Every Post to the Front Page of Digg- If you’ve read any of my posts, you know I’m all for social media marketing. I think it’s a great way to build links, to engage with your target audience, and to generate traffic to your website. However, you need to realize that not every post you write is worthy of the front page of Digg or of any other social media site for that matter. If you’re constantly pushing every single post on these social networking sites people will begin to ignore you. Even worse, you could end up getting banned.

•    Not Knowing Your Competitor’s Back Links- If you don’t know what your competition is up to, how can you expect to pass them in the SERPs? Take a look at their back links by entering the link: www.yourcompetitorssite.com (example URL) into the Yahoo search bar. Not only will this help you understand what you need to do to outrank them, but it could also provide a great starting point for your link building campaign. You may be able to get inbound links from the same sites that link to your competition.

Now that you know some link building pitfalls to avoid, you can kick your campaign into overdrive. And remember, quality trumps quantity every time.

What link building mistakes have you made? Share them with us in the replies!

This is only an addition to a set of different web services that are available to LinkShare publishers. The web service was silently launched months earlier already and this post was originally written, but not published in June, a few days before the soft launch of the service. I provided feedback back in June. I updated and expanded this post to incorporate changes and additions to the new features since I originally wrote it some five months ago.

This API is LinkShare’s first step into the realm of contextual advertising. The web service returns 1-X products of a LinkShare Advertiser, based on the content of a web page that was either specified in the API call or the referring page /URL (default), if no link was provided.

This is not a full blown contextual advertising service like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Amazon Omakase Links or eBay AdContext. LinkShare does not render any ads for you. You or somebody else (hint) needs to do this for you. Maybe LinkShare will offer something like this in the future, but nothing is planned to my knowledge.

The implementation guide lines for this API for developers can be found here.

A Look under the Hood

Let’s take a look under the hood. I had already a bunch of questions after looking over the beta of their Implementation Guidelines. LinkShare did not get back to me yet regarding all the questions and comments that I had, so I decided to repeat them here in my post.

Using the vast number of products that are already available to LinkShare via their Merchandiser Service (Affiliate Product Data Feeds) is a good thing to do and something that I have been talking about with people for a long time already. Making access to the product information as easy as possible for non-technical folks should be high on the priority list of advertisers. Existing and potentially new affiliates often like to promote a particular product they like and recommend. Being able to pull a product ad with affiliate link to get a commission for referrals is not as easy as adding an iLike widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. It should be, but we are still a far cry away from this.

Access to the new API is cumbersome and not helping a lot with the mentioned goal to make it very easy to use. Advertisers decide for themselves if they want to make their products available through the API or not. The advertiser must be using the LinkShare Merchandiser Service already though. Merchandiser enabled advertisers are not automatically enabled for Easy Links. You can find a list of Easy Links supporting merchants at the LinkShare Help Center here.

The affiliate itself also has to be enabled for the API and as far as I understand does this also require to be already enabled for the Merchandiser Service. The Merchandiser is not free to get access to for many affiliates. You either have to pay a setup fee or must be a good performing affiliate within the LinkShare network for several months already. But even if the Advertiser has the API enabled and uses the Merchandiser and you are an affiliate of that merchant and have Merchandiser enabled for your account, does not give you automatically access to the API. The merchant has to manually approve every affiliate first. I don’t know if advertisers can enable automatic approval or not, at least for affiliates who were already approved to receive the advertisers product data feed via FTP.

Once you are approved for the API itself and for the access to the advertiser’s products via the API, you can start making API calls and use the new web services feature. Unfortunately,  it is necessary to specify with the API call which advertiser’s products should be used for the contextual matching. It does not work in the way that the more advertisers are enabled for the API for your account the more products will become available for the matching of your content. This is a huge drawback and something LinkShare will hopefully change soon.

The affiliate has to specify an advertiser’s MID with the API call and then only 1-x of the products available for that single merchant will be returned. This means that the affiliate has to pre-qualify the content of every page where you want to make use of the API first. If the page is about listening to music and not about making music, you should specify the MID of Apple iTunes and not Musicnotes.com to get a good match for example. This determination is a large piece of the matching already. If you need the API make some work for you, then I guess that you have to use advertisers like Overstock.com, WalMart or Target.com who have a lot of different products.

I noted back in June in my feedback to LinkShare about the new web service, that the practical use for the API will be significantly limited because of the requirement to provide the MID of an advertiser for the contextual matching. Ads cannot be generated like an AdSense, YPN, Amazon’s Omakase, eBay AdContext or Microsoft Content Ad.

The “MID” is not something that a publisher specifies today on a page and ad unit level. He cannot reuse existing meta-data (keywords meta-tags etc.) and has only very few (and always ugly) ways of doing it. If you cannot find or program yourself a work around, the only option you are left with to limit the content of your whole website or website section to make sure that it always matched the product catalog of a specific merchant and then hard code the MID in your site template. I strongly suggest to make the MID optional and do a contextual matching across all merchants that are enabled for the publisher.

The updated developers guide also did not provide an answer to what results you have to expect in certain instances. I hope that the following question will be answered by the LinkShare web services team soon.

If I specify that I want 10 products back as a result, but you cannot find 10 products that actually match the content, what do you do? Do you return less than the 10 (only the ones where you have some kind of match)? Or are you filling the missing slots with products that you pick based on other criteria? What happens if there are no matches at all? I didn’t see an error message for that, which implies that you always return at least one product.

Web Interface and Widgets

In addition to the access to the Easy Links feature via web services, for the tech-savvy affiliates, LinkShare also offers access to the Easy-Links feature via an easy to use web interface. If you know how to create and implement Google AdSense ads into your website, you won’t have any issues with using the Easy Links widgets provided via the LinkShare web interface for publishers.

The ad units provided by LinkShare are pre-defined, and are available in the standard banner sizes: 300 x 250 (medium rectangle), 468 x 60 (full banner), 234 x 60 (half banner), 120 x 240 (vertical banner), 125 x 125 (square button), 728 x 90 (leader board), 160 x 600 (wide skyscraper) and 120 x 600 (skyscraper).

The units can be customized to some degree. You can specify the border color, text color and link color and if you want to show the product name and/or product price. You do not have control over the product image and whether or not you want to show it. It also comes with a “buy now” button image, which cannot be changed. Also the link at the end of each product with the anchor “at Merchant Name” is static and not customizable.

Also not customizable are the background color of the ad unit, the font face, the font styles (bold, italic, size) and an alternative style for links if they are hovered over by the visitor. The border around the ad unit cannot be suppressed, if you want to. You can only change the color to match your site’s background as closely as possible, especially if the background is not simply one color, but an image or gradient etc.

However, it’s a good start and most affiliates are probably able to live with the limitations. I also assume that the team at LinkShare will extend on the available options in the future.

The ads will not show the most relevant products right away. It may take up to 48 hours until LinkShare determined the most relevant products for your particular pages. LinkShare will show products that match the site category that you selected during registration for your web site until LinkShare completed the contextual matching process.

The code to add to your affiliate pages looks like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
lsadunit_publisherId = 'YOURPUBLISHERID';
lsadunit_oid = '102327';
lsadunit_width = 160;
lsadunit_height = 600;
lsadunit_uid = '2004804';
lsadunit_u1 = '';
</script>
<script src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js"
 mce_src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js"
 type="text/javascript">
</script>

You can get additional help and information to this feature at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers here.

Personal Comments

LinkShare also seems to be pretty confident that they are able to do a perfect job when it comes to the matching of products to the publisher’s page content. Even Google who has a much bigger pool of ads to chose from and several years for improving their matching algorithms (which still fails to produce good results in many cases), provides some means for the publisher to help them with the matching.

I am almost certain that LinkShare’s matching is by far not as good as Google’s nor do they have remotely enough ads to pick from for the matching, which makes it not always easier to find an ad that is actually relevant and targeted.

I suggested to LinkShare that the publisher will be provided with some overwrite options, e.g. a set of keywords that should be used. At the very least as a failover, if LinkShare’s content matching returns too few results or no results at all.

In addition to that they could use the proprietary HTML tags by Google or by Yahoo! for the specification, which (content) segments of a HTML document should be included for the content matching (the Google tag) and/or which segments should be excluded from the matching (the Yahoo! tag).

I am pleased to see that a few of my suggestions and comments that I made to LinkShare directly were actually listed to and changed, such as the inclusion of the Error Numbers in the developer guide.

Conclusion

Overall I have to say that I think that it was a move into the right direction by LinkShare, but that I am not impressed by the implementation of the API as it is now. Some might argue that you are better of using the existing Merchandiser Query Tool API, which is not very far-fetched, but they just started.

The least I want to do is discourage the folks over at LinkShare and stop with what they are doing right now. Consider this assessment as a well intentioned feedback. Let’s keep the stuff coming!

To learn more about the LinkShare web services and data feeds as well as web services and data feeds provided by other affiliate networks, check out the collection of resources and guides over here.

* Note to LinkShare Merchandiser Access
Request for access to Merchandiser Feeds – Online Form at LinkShare.com

Quote from their website:

• You have been active in the Network for at least 3 months, AND
• You have generated at least 50 orders in the most recent calendar month

LinkShare reserves the right to charge a one-time maintenance fee of $250 or discontinue access to the Merchandiser product.

Additional Information and Resources to Easy Links

• Easy Links Product Info for Publisher (PDF)
• Easy Links Feature Help at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers
• Implementation Guide Line for Developers
• List of Easy Links enabled Advertisers
• You can also watch the recording of an educational screen cast from LinkShare about Easy Links here. You can also find additional recordings of seminars for Publishers at the LinkShare.com website here

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski

Social apps

Web Services allow that developers to integrate affiliate links with their shopping app. Since web services allow developers to build links “on the fly”, they’re especially useful for sites that need to cater to dynamic data. Two great examples of developers using web services in smart ways are Buzzilions and StyleFeeder, both featured on ReveNews.

With web services end users interact with advertisers, not just publishers. For example the publisher Lemonade allows anyone to develop his or her own “Lemonade Stand” with their service. The Lemonade Stand builders can hand-select products and promotions, and then plug that Stand into his or her social networking platform of choice. Visitors to his or her social networking page can see these hand selected products and, if they choose to buy one, the Stand builder and Lemonade share in the commission. The end user is actually choosing which ads to show. The developer builds the containers that enable this interaction.

To help further such interaction LinkShare just released a new API called Targeted Merchandiser which enables developers to build customized, contextual product widgets.

The web is becoming more social. Web services make affiliate links available in a way that can be tied in to the social web.

Contextual Ads

Contextual advertising has been around for a while, but affiliate networks are just starting to expand into this area. In the right setting, contextual advertising can make it easier for publishers to promote relevant advertisers, and for advertisers to gain distribution. Affiliate networks now offer solutions that allow publishers to determine product relevance based on their content and that require less technical expertise.

One such product is LinkShare’s Easy Links. This program uses a predictive algorithm and an advertiser product feed to display relevant products on a publisher page. We’ve seen the most publisher adoption so far from niche content sites and blogs.

For example, a gardening blog can partner with a few Gardening advertisers such as Gardener’s Supply and Parkseed. If these advertisers offer Easy Links, the gardening blog can place those Easy Links on their site and customize the design to match the look and feel. The Easy Link will then display top converting and relevant gardening products from their chosen advertisers. The gardening blog is paid a revenue share based on sales generated for the advertiser.

Affiliate programs are becoming more user-friendly for publishers with all levels of technical experience. By offering these solutions, networks are working towards broadening the footprint of affiliate marketing.

Interactive Ads

There’s a wide range of creative types that can enhance the end users shopping experience. Video and product widgets are two examples. One of my favorite examples is from Beatport which sells digital music to a niche audience. They created a Flex Link that enabled their publishers to place their audio player on their site and offer song snippets to their users. It makes for an engaging sales tool, as well as valuable content. As the industry becomes more competitive it is important for publishers to leverage new and engaging types of creative that drive higher conversions – beyond banners and text links.

Flex Links give our network the means to leverage different types of rich and engaging content with their users. We have some examples up here.

Affiliate 2.0

As innovation continues to drive change in e-commerce, we will continue to see creativity in the way advertisers and publishers work together. The web can change overnight. To capture interest, and revenue, in such a world companies should seriously evaluate the types of tools we’ve described above, and leverage the expertise of their affiliate marketing partners to help them make the most of this great new frontier.

About the Guest Contributor: Ian Rosenwach is a product manager at LinkShare, a global online advertising services provider.