New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit

Friday, February 29th, 2008 by Janet Meiners

New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit

Affiliate Summit, a conference for affiliate marketers and affiliate managers, just ended in Las Vegas. I usually attend but I didn’t go this year. Gary Marcoccia at AvantLink told me about a new affiliate tool that debuted at the Summit, that I wish every affiliate network had. AvantLink is a smaller network of affiliate programs.

The tool is called the Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) and it makes the process of adding affiliate links automatic. Any time you link to a product or service with a merchant in Avant Link’s network, a piece of javascript automatically changes the links redirects it to an affiliate link. As an affiliate this would make my job much easier, because it’s so tedious to change your links one by one.

In my view, affiliate marketing is still underappreciated, despite its size and potential to help small businesses make money on their content. Here’s an illustration of how the tool works. Let’s say Andy’s new book, Radically Transparent (which I just got a copy of and look forward to reading it) was being sold by a merchant in Avant Link’s network. You sign up as an affiliate of that company. You write a review of the book and link to a merchant that sells the book.

If you’re signed up as an affiliate you can earn a percentage of what someone spends on that book. It takes a little technical know-how to figure out how, but essentially the merchant gives you a unique URL that identifies you as the referrer. Then if someone buys the book, you get paid. Rather than getting paid for a click you get paid part of the purchase price.

Speaking of reputations, there’s some reason for affiliate marketing’s sometimes bad rap. It has to do with rogue affiliate marketers gaming Google with ads that gave users little value. Over time new policies (like the Google Quality Score) has helped reigned things back in. Even though the industry has changed over the years Affiliate Summit still has that energy of entrepreneurialism (see the blog).

Given the sometimes tenuous relationship between Google and affiliates, and Google’s frown on paid links, some worry that the tool could hurt their Google rankings. Gary responded, “We can’t say with 100% certainty what Google will or will not see this as sneaky, but…the network redirect link shows in the browser status bar when the site visitor hovers over the link text.”

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23 comments on “New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit”

Craig Says:

February 29th, 2008 at 2:26 pm

ALE sounds interesting, but I guess I’m a little confused about how they are proposing the redirects to work?
Seomotion Says:

February 29th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

Sounds really interesting. I will try it in work.
Internet Marketing Joy Says:

February 29th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

Is it effective? and how effective?
Affiliate Marketing » Blog Archive » New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit Says:

February 29th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

[...] Original post by Marketing Pilgrim [...]
Rice Blogger Says:

March 1st, 2008 at 5:55 am

that would be good to have
Don@AffiliateWatcher Says:

March 1st, 2008 at 9:24 am

Sounds good, although I’ll have to try it out. There is already several WP Plugins out there that will cloak aff links on your WP blogs and/or add aff links to keywords in your blog post. One can never have too many affiliate tools!
Steve Rosenbaum Says:

March 1st, 2008 at 11:59 am

This tool sounds great if google doesn’t frown upon it and ding users implementing it.
Futon-Matt Says:

March 2nd, 2008 at 8:55 am

I agree that this tool sounds pretty cool.
Gabriele Says:

March 2nd, 2008 at 2:20 pm

This sounds really cool. I could definitely use a tool like this.
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Craig Says:

March 2nd, 2008 at 5:38 pm

Gabriele, guaranteed number one, eh? I’ve heard that pitch so many times before. What makes your service unique?
Craig Says:

March 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm

@ Gabriele – I just looked at your blog…If you think for even one second that 1on40 is a legitimate service, you are crazy. It’s such a scam. Please don’t spam marketing pilgrim.
Mike Montague Says:

March 3rd, 2008 at 8:31 am

Does anyone know how Google plans to crack down more this year on paid links? Inquiring minds want to know.
Steven Bradley Says:

March 3rd, 2008 at 11:58 pm

Interesting tool, though how Google views it will have a lot to do with how useful it becomes.
Who’s Talking about Affiliate Summit this Week? | Affiliate Summit Blog Says:

March 7th, 2008 at 4:44 pm

[...] New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit 29 Feb 2008 by Janet Meiners Affiliate Summit, a conference for affiliate marketers and affiliate managers, just ended in Las Vegas. I usually attend but I didn’t go this year. Gary Marcoccia at AvantLink told me about a new affiliate tool that debuted at the … [...]
Limo Hire Says:

April 1st, 2008 at 5:25 pm

I’m quite interested to know what Google are doing to paid links too.
Gary M Says:

June 5th, 2008 at 11:26 am

Thanks Janet for the article. Better late than never, but I wanted to comment on our Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) tool. Google et al won’t see the network tracking links as they are embedded on the end user click only. All direct links from blogs, forums, static web pages, etc. are detected with a Javascript so long as there is a domain match with one of our merchants. If detected, the Jscript places the appropriate tracking details for the Affiliate who is using the ALE. We created this tool so forum and other web community owners could get commission credit for direct links to merchants that community members might post. And it’s proven very useful across many other platforms. One Afffiliate blogger had several thousand pages of archives with direct links to outdoor gear merchants (that are in AvantLink) throughout. He added the ALE to his Wordpress header and wala: Intsant tracking links through direct links in years of archives and comments. He’s rightly being credited now for many sales every month that if not for the ALE, he would never get credit for! Gary M

Gary M’s last blog post..By: AvantLink Support
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July 21st, 2008 at 10:12 am

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Wayne Brooks Says:

August 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am

The ALE tool sounds very similar to what is provided through CBProAds, in that by entering a few bits of information and your ClickBank ID you engage in a Pay-By-Sale model rather than a Pay-Per-Click model.

Until we correspond again,
Wayne
Your Online Business Advisor
Timothy Miles Says:

September 8th, 2008 at 11:39 am

As a novice to affiliate marketing, I treasure anything that will make getting started easier. The learning curve in internet marketing is quite gentle to simply get involved but very steep to become competent and competitive. As someone working on developing a new affiliate program, it’s easy finding resources but difficult separating the wheat from the chaff.
Limo Hire Birmingham Says:

September 8th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

this new marketing tool could be just what we needed. great..
Homer Says:

October 5th, 2008 at 6:01 am

Wealthy Affiliate is every thing you need to succeed online.
PuReWebDev Says:

November 26th, 2008 at 9:08 pm

I hope I can make it to Affiliate Summit for 2009. If I went, I’d be able to see some of these cool new tools first hand. I caught some of the videos of the conference online though. I was paying special attention to the Amazon Associates portion.

PuReWebDev’s last blog post..Amazon S3 has Akamai Laying off 7% Of It’s Work Force, Maybe.
Baxtor Says:

December 13th, 2008 at 4:32 pm

Excellent information i will try it out soon. I read many blogs earlier about this topic. But I never found complete information

Baxtor’s last blog post..Affiliate Idol Review & $298 Bonus!

Marketing Pilgrim