Marketing Pilgrim's "Affiliate Marketing" Channel

Sponsor Marketing Pilgrim's Affiliate Marketing Channel today! Get in front of some of the most influential readers in the Internet and social media marketing industry. Contact us today!
by
11 Comments

Amazon Provides Economic Light in Dark Days

posted on January 30, 2009

Amazon had a great fourth quarter as reported today in the WSJ. Sales were up 18% and profits rose 9%.amazon Those numbers are pretty strong when things are going well but in today’s economy these are outrageous results.

Here’s a few more numbers to drool over. Earnings of $225 million for the quarter ended Dec 31st. This is compared to earnings of $207 million for the same period a year earlier. What’s that you ask a company that’s experiencing growth year over year in this environment? Yup, that’s right. Oh and the $6.7 billion (with a “b”) revenue number for the quarter is very impressive indeed.

by
1 Comment

Register Now for Affiliate Summit West 2009

posted on December 19, 2008

Whether you’re a merchant with an affiliate program, or an affiliate marketer, you won’t want to miss Affiliate Summit West. The event takes place Jan 11-13 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and is your chance to learn from expert speakers and network with fellow marketers.

Group rates are available, as are sponsorship packages, but you’d better register early–paying on site will cost you an extra $500!

I’m moderating and speaking on the panel "Managing Your Brand"–providing advice for both merchants and affiliates–and, if you can stay an extra day, I still have some space for my Online Reputation Management Workshop.

I hope to see you there!

by
10 Comments

Google Image Search + LIFE’s Photo Archive

posted on November 18, 2008

iconic wwii life photoYou guys remember LIFE magazine, right? Known as a scion of glossy photojournalism, Life was published in one form or another until last year (with a few gaps, of course). And like any publication, Life had a good amount of material that it was never able to use. But now Life’s parent company, Time, has found the perfect use for its photo archives—digitizing them with Google Image Search.

Google announces today the LIFE collection in Google Image Search. Google will be digitizing all 10 million of the archived photos, drawings and etchings over the next few months, with 20% of the collection already available.

by
10 Comments

Merchants Ban Affiliates Based on New York Tax

posted on May 28, 2008

Affiliate marketers in New York have reason to follow politics – and it’s not the presidential race. Instead it’s a new law (pdf of law) that has retailers collect taxes for sales through affiliate marketers based in New York. The law applies to all online transactions for companies that have no physical presence in New York. It starts June 1, 2008.

The bad idea started with Governor Spitzer, and was recently signed into law by New York’s new governor David Paterson. They figured it would be an easy way for them to collect more taxes. Affiliates make money by referring people to products and services online. They get a commission when someone makes a purchase.

by
8 Comments

Google to Sell Off SEM Division of DoubleClick

posted on April 2, 2008

When Google decided to buy DoubleClick, it sent some shock through the search marketing industry. DoubleClick has owned Performics, the third largest affiliate network, since 2004. Performics not only provided affiliate marketing services, but also search-engine marketing (SEM) and search-engine optimization (SEO) services.

Suddenly it looked like agencies would be competing against Google – a serious conflict of interest. Agencies were suddenly worried that Google would give away the services that they sold to clients. And Performics may get unfair advantages, such as insight into Google’s algorithms (more details from InfoWorld).

Clients of SEM and SEO companies likely wouldn’t like the conflict of interest either. Clients want to save money, Google wants those same clients to spend it on more advertising.

by
24 Comments

eBay Drops Commission Junction

posted on March 18, 2008

I don’t know if this had anything to do with Shoemoney’s cajoling but eBay is going solo and bringing their affiliate program in-house. They’re calling it the eBay Partner Network and launched a new blog about it.

As of April 1, 2008 the program will be dropped from the largest affiliate network – Commission Junction. They handle the reporting and pay affiliates in behalf of customers like Yahoo!, Home Depot, and Buy.com. Commission Junction is owned by ValueClick (which recently had some bad news of its own).

eBay started their affiliate program in 2001 and it has more than 100,000 affiliates globally. For those unfamiliar, an affiliate marketer is a person or business who promotes eBay’s products on their web site, blog, or forum and makes money each time they refer a sale.

by
23 Comments

New Affiliate Marketing Tool Debuts at Affiliate Summit

posted on February 29, 2008

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.