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.

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?

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!

Beginning this month many business owners will be surprised when they start receiving new tax forms issued by their credit-card and online-payment processors which are intended to keep businesses from hiding income.

Of course, the amount on your statements likely don’t account for the actual amounts received, less fees, credits and chargebacks. It’s going to be a confusing nightmare no-matter how you look at it but the law it is so we will adapt.

Going forward be aware of this new challenge and adapt accordingly. A wonderful reference article from Business Week about the new tax form that I found insightful can be found by clicking here.

If you have had your existing web server for more than 2-3 years you may want to double check to insure you are receiving the best value you can. As computer and server prices drop, new server equipment is brought online and competition builds among webhosting companies prices are dropping to historically low prices.

In a recent check our own server would be $70.00 a month less if we simply provisioned a new server account with our existing host Blue Bayou and migrated the domains from the old server or, we could get an entirely new Linux server offering nearly four times the storage space, four times the RAM and a significantly better OS core for about $6.00 a month less then we are paying now. For us, an upgrade is in-order (so look for a faster Commission X) soon.

As an affiliate you know how much speed is a factor. Lest we forget that Google also considers page speed as a major factor according to search engine land.

Most webhosts that I checked with were unable or unwilling to offer any type of re-rate staying put so you have to be prepared to actually leave or to provision a new server. Hinting I might leave got me nowhere, though Blue Bayou did offer me 15% off my purchase to upgrade to a new server.

The time to migrate to a new server can run as little as 60-90 minutes depending on how much data needs to be transferred but it’s basically an automated task with the Plesk Migration Manager assuming you are migrating from a server with a recent version of Plesk installed as well.

When was the last time you compared your server to current product offerings (even from your current webhost)? What do you consider a wide enough dollar gap to go through a new provisioning and migration?

+Nick J. West

CPV can be an excellent model to generate interest in a new website, blog, product or service. Did you know that StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a CPV platform?

So, what’s better about StumbleUpon as a CPV engine? For one good content is rewarded with additional free traffic from StumbleUpon and other related high value websites through cross-promotion.

Two, and probably most important is the eyeballs that will see your website with StumbleUpon want to be there, they aren’t paid, they are real humans and they are opinionated as hell. (That’s a good thing).

I also believe that StumbleUpon Paid Discovery a great arena to introduce something you think might have the potential of going viral or, to help establish a following with a new blog.

Make sure that you always present clear opportunities for your visitor to like or fan your offer, page or blog (like below).

Don’t rush into launching a new campaign without first researching your niche within StumbleUpon to see both what others are doing and what others find and mark useful. If they aren’t clicking the thumbs up your Stumble Upon campaign will more than likely be a failure, and you will be missing out on the free cross-promotion.

Testing the water with StumbleUpon is easy with a low entry cost and low per view costs as well.

Give it a try by clicking here and let us know what you think. Already have tried or currently use StumbleUpon Paid Discovery let others know about your experiences (good/bad) in the comments section below.

+Nick J. West

A website without an analytics program is useless. Without analytics data you have no idea where your website is or, even where it’s going. A web analytics program tracks your success and, your failures allowing you to steer the ship towards your destination ports.

Making structured changes to your website is an on-going exercise, routine maintenance aside it’s one of those things where a rising tide doesn’t raise all ships, and in-fact can just as easily sink a ship if not done correctly. Analytics help guide you on your journey and insure that you can adequately track your progresses.

Thinking your current course is fine or even worse charting an entirely new course without a map or analytics tracking is ignorance. Were you to encounter trouble you may have already hit a rock before realizing the ship is going down. Dropping an anchor doesn’t always help and may beach or completely sink the ship.

Choosing an Analytics program?

Google Analytics in most cases meets the needs of small to medium enterprises but there are tons of off-the-shelf products ranging from a low-to-high entry cost should you wish to explore your options. Google Analytics is free, but in exchange you are trading off the anonymous data sharing of your companies aggregated traffic data with Google.

Set goals early on to maximize data sets.

At first, data will likely be insufficient to make any concrete determinations however after just a few months you will begin to see patterns begin to emerge.

Setting goals early helps gather valuable data from day one that can be used later on. Set up and run regular analytics reports and make sure everyone in your organization receives a copy once a month or as needed and meet quarterly at minimum to discuss progress and emerging data sets.

Track the number of newsletter subscribers, newsletter unsubscribers, how many visitors reach the desired conversion or landing page and anything you consider to be an action, conversion or subscriber.

Translating the data?

If after you have gathered a few months to a years worth of data you are still not seeing a better picture of your websites traffic and growth patterns work collaboratively with other staff members to understand the data or consider an outside source reviewing your progress and explain how to best use the information at your fingertips.

Basically certain benchmarks should overtime show an increase like average visitor time on site, average depth of visitor visits (how many pages) etc., others like visitor bounce rate should show a steady rate and hopefully and eventually a gradual decline.

Use other tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and Page Speed in conjunction with your Google Analytics data. It’s often more easily digestible and as you grow and learn you can then begin to take advantage of the over 1200+ custom report settings available in Google Analytics to really pull out all the stops.

What do you find to be the most useful aspect of analytics tools? As an affiliate publisher do you find existing analytics tools meet your most pressing requirements or needs improvement? How do you integrate analytics tracking with conversion data for the umpteen million different publisher ad platforms that are in the market?

+Nick J. West