New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit
Friday, February 29th, 2008;
-- 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 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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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?
February 29th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Sounds really interesting. I will try it in work.
February 29th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Is it effective? and how effective?
February 29th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
[…] Original post by Marketing Pilgrim […]
March 1st, 2008 at 5:55 am
that would be good to have
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!
March 1st, 2008 at 11:59 am
This tool sounds great if google doesn’t frown upon it and ding users implementing it.
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:55 am
I agree that this tool sounds pretty cool.
March 2nd, 2008 at 2:20 pm
This sounds really cool. I could definitely use a tool like this.
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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?
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm
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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.
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.
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 … […]
April 1st, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I’m quite interested to know what Google are doing to paid links too.