Commission Explosion

If only “pay for performance” meant just that. It doesn’t… not by a long shot. Much of what’s called pay for performance is more accurately described as “pay for some of the performance we believe we can directly track from the delivery of an impression through to an immediate purchase.”

The difference is enormous, and it’s creating systemic, long-term problems for marketers and advertisers alike. We must, as an industry, put pay for performance in context while we still have time to preserve the value it can offer online marketers.

Pay-for-performance advertising is a tool to accomplish a job. Marketers have myriad business and marketing objectives they can leverage the Internet to accomplish. For some, pay-for-performance advertising is the right tool. Affiliate programs, paid search, online retail, straight direct marketing, barter deals, and monetization of remnant inventory are all objectives that can be well served by pay for performance. Yet pay-for-performance implementation extends far beyond these objectives into campaigns with goals best accomplished with other tools.

With little announcement other than a short blog post here the Google Affiliate Network or GAN (formerly Performics) announced they will be closing their doors in the next few months.

“We’ll continue to support our customers as we wind down the product over the next few months.”

This comes as a surprise to many including myself. Yes, I knew there were problems with GAN, having personally used the services as both a merchant, and as a publisher. But I would have expected more from Google in terms of support and possibly lower costs.

Clients of ours who also used the services as merchants often complained about the high entry cost to GAN, along with similarly high fees for any product sales resulting from referrals.

Google Radio, Google TV, Google Newspapers, Froogle, come on Google I know products may come and go but your customers deserve more, don’t forget Google, the use of Google services is also an investment of time by those who utilize the platforms.

If you sell any-type of SEO services you undoubtedly have heard a variety of turn-downs, especially from small business owners.

It is a real challenge reaching that small business owner who has a list of reasons that they don’t have a website, and worse, they don’t need or want a website.

There are reasons that they have never contemplated, so it is your duty to inform them and not take no as the only answer.

#1 Claim your major directory listings (Google Places, Yelp, Merchant Circle). Don’t and a scammer, spammer or even a competitor may hijack your listings.
#2 Even a simple 4-5 page ‘business card website’ is better than no-website. Then when you are ready to spend the investment in bettering the website later you have already established your domains presence.
#3 Your local traffic is already looking for you online more than from the yellow or white pages.
#4 Any investment you put into a website is likely to offer a high ROI.
#5 Building a website now offers you an opportunity to establish yourself as your local-expert and reap the rewards.
#6 It’s for when business is not so good. Building a website when times are slow is too late.
#7 A @yourdomain e-mail address for your operation looks much more professional than an @att.net address.

I often find that after digging deeper, it usually boils down to one or two things holding a small-business owner back. Either they still believe they have to be entirely hands-on during the process, or they are simply afraid because they want these things but don’t know who will execute and manage it.

If it’s the latter, your answer is always ‘you can handle most of it for them’.

What are some of your comeback responses to ‘no’? What is the most outrageous turndown to having a website or using outsourced SEO services that you’ve heard?

People visit the Warrior Forum, a popular webmaster and developer (and sales) forum for a variety of reasons. Most first time visitors like with many forums arrive there seeking answers to a plethora of issues.

Today, I saw a question that was so GREAT, that many users should ask themselves the same or a similarly posed question when making a decision to purchase any number of WordPress plugins, scripts and software that are peddled on WF (and elsewhere).

Question(s):

- Does your protection software that’s included need to validate every time we open the WordPress Admin Panel and every time someone accesses the player?

- Does validation occur from one of your websites, and if so, must this website always be up and running in order to validate the software? (Will we be dependent upon software website access to this site?)

- Could recurring validation slow down Video Player access?

WOW, what great questions. This is one or should be of the big concerns with purchase, how long will you be able to access it without an upgrade and forbid the company dissolving and not having access to the validation server.

I, as have many people have purchased software, scripts etc over the years that became useless when the validation server went down temporarily, and sometimes forever!

See the original post (#19) here: http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/662130-new-warrior-special-offer-hottest-video-player-hands-down.html

I was excited to hear from my Mother by phone. She is proficient at e-mail and Facebook so the calls are not as frequent unless it’s an emergency. So, this call was a surprise. Her voice was fast and pitched, excited that she had found this new website called Pinterest and she wanted to know if I heard about it?

After laughing to myself for a few seconds I continued to listen to her excitedly rosy description of Pinterest and how she is able to pin these images to a pinboard where she is organizing all these garden-ideas she wants to do, or at least dreams about doing someday.

This is news, and big news because though I am fully aware of the growing interest in Pinterest you can tell from earlier posts that Pinterest was not that exciting to me as a marketer, that is a marketer without a product image to ‘pin’.

What dawned on me however that Pinterest has reached a demographic that has so far been elusive to many marketers, the female 50+ demographic. Pinterest has that demographic in a nutshell and if properly used, many marketers have a great opportunity to reach that crowd.

What are you doing with Pinterest? Are your conversions (if any) from Pinterest trackable?

We all get them, invitations to attend a variety of conferences, training seminars or product introduction events.

Aside from the obvious networking opportunities which are hit and miss, you may be surprised at an event an actually learn something that could propel your enterprise to the next level.

We recently attended both an event by Google AdSense in Your City, and IBM’s BPM product, both of which were invaluable and added to our bottom line quickly after implementation.

Don’t pass up on your opportunities to attend an event near you, nor let the mistake of thinking you won’t find something useful for your business keep you from attending.

Many of you are resellers of one kind or another. What would you think of a company that solicited your hard-earned customers to sell them a product (via a different, non-trackable shopping cart)?

Would you feel slighted? A recent experience with a reseller account via iNeedHits did exactly that. It’s Google +1 program is setup to direct customers to a different shopping cart.

Frankly this seems a bit dishonest, if not misleading and deceptive to its resellers and therefore their clients. When I questioned their support team this is the response I got:

The Google plus 1s is not included on the Reseller commission as this is a Beta service and not in the ineedhits cart. Anything purchased from facebook.ineedhits is not included in the Reseller commission.

Clearly, at minimum they should have disclosed this to their resellers and refrained from soliciting reseller clients until the product was no-longer in beta.

The assigned head team or individual responsible for your companies Facebook profile (often you) launch the companies Facebook profile with big hopes, after-all, all you have to do is make posts about events, news and post some cool pictures like you do with your own Facebook page, Right? Wrong.

Above is an example of a post gone wrong. GREAT post, very informative and useful but it doesn’t direct the viewer or link to the website or location off Facebook.

Content, articles, tips, news or information should always first be posted on the companies own hosted blog, or company web page and then the link should be shared via a Facebook post. That way you still ‘own and control’ the content, and will over-time receive the maximum benefit of the post you shared with your FB fans.

What happens if Facebook goes away? Highly unlikely anytime soon but there is a chance you may lose access to a profile or some other event beyond your direct control in the future that could mean that all that content you fed Facebook would be down the drain.

You can either build content FOR Facebook or, build content for your company and then share it with Facebook liberally. Doing the first method insures that the only one to truly benefit from the content will be Facebook. Building and posting content to your own website, a blog on your own domain and then linking to that content as a Facebook post benefits both you, your potential customer and yes, Facebook.

Let’s covers some other ways you are probably doing posts wrong. Images! Everyone loves images on Facebook pages and with the new Facebook Timeline pages images are a necessity for the page to be engaging.

Are you watermarking your images? Don’t lose potential traffic from a clever, whimsical or beautiful photo that get’s passed around virally. Above is an example image watermarked using Google Picasa Editor (free).

Make sure you keep control of your content, first-and-foremost and then share it with your social media outlets. What are some ways that you believe most are doing it wrong?

If you weren’t affected by the massive DirectTrack service failure of a few weeks back then you may not be aware of the controversy surrounding Digital Rivers responsibility for the service failure.

For publishers the deafening silence during the extended outage was a frustrating experience in ‘what the hell do we do now?’ And even more time spent asking ourselves ‘what do we do if it happens again?’

Now that a few weeks have passed, we have a better understanding of what we can do internally in such a crisis but I was dismayed at the lack of response from the networks who use the Direct Track platform.

During the outage we heard from virtually every network who didn’t use DirectTrack’s platform, and during the outage not a single network who uses DirectTracks platform was able to reach out because their contacts were only stored within DirectTracks system. Big lesson learned by many at one-time with this flawed system.

Of all the affiliate publisher networks that we deal with only one, yes just ‘one’ made any effort to explain what happened, what they were doing to prevent a catastrophe like that from re-occurring and made good for any losses as best as any one company can.

Though we weren’t able to take part in their offer to make it up to us, a big shout-out to MySavings Media for the follow-up support!

I recently read another timely article on Perform Insider about Pinterest a popular and fast growing website where according to their website “People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes”.

Nothing really new about the service that hasn’t been tried before by similar community share platforms but why is Pinterest suddenly raising eyebrows? Apparently, their practice of automatically replacing any user generated product or retailer links with affiliate links of their own.

From Perform Insider: “Several blogs have questions this, not only as being deceiving but a possible violation of FTC rules that require that disclosure when content is disguised as an advertisement. Pinterest’s argument could be that they themselves are not actually promoting the product, they are changing the code and thus it’s not a real placement. Either way, its something they need to address because the FTC has already shown they don’t appreciate when people hide advertising in content without telling users about it.”

My overall concern is built on the whole user-generated ‘content’ aspect. I can appreciate website monetization challenges but I believe I am right in my assessment that the practice without notifying your users in clear language throughout is wrong in my own personal opinion.

Pinterest responded to the building criticism on their blog: “Online communities need ways to generate revenue to support their operations, and the preference is always to earn this revenue without disrupting their users or detracting from their UI with flashy advertisements. Creating a beautiful, user-friendly site, as Pinterest has done, mandates a non-intrusive way to make money.”

Now that that’s aside let us move onto the service they purportedly use called Skimlinks (affiliate link). Datafeed programs and javascript offerings tried in the past (albeit not exactly like this) have been around for a number of years, mostly small operations with a few dozen merchant offerings like Goldencan (who you still have to have an established merchant relationship with).

No program as far as I know has the reach of Skimlinks with a stated merchant program base of 18,000+ merchants and 32 affiliate Networks. Another enticing feature is that as a publisher, approval into Skimlinks then gets you ‘instantly approved’ to promote so many different merchants with just ‘one’ simple javascript placement. The cost to use the service is a straight 25% revenue share from any sales resulting from your publishers link.

What is your opinion of Skimlinks. What about the disclosure process? Even more important does it work for your website, blog and your content type ? What about the programs transparency? Do you feel confident sending your traffic through them as a provider? Do you only send select traffic or go all-out?

+Nick J. West