I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to attend over 10 Affiliate Summit conferences and can say without reservation that I have gotten my money’s worth out of every one of them. Whether you are just starting affiliate marketing and need a little education or have been doing it for a long time and want to grow your business, there is something for you at Affiliate Summit.

Affiliate Summit East 2012 is going to be held August 12-14 at the Hilton New York in New York City. Although the agenda is just starting to take shape, I’ve looked through the list of people who applied to speak and have no doubt that there will be a wealth of information in the sessions. Add to that the Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, and networking opportunities and you will not be disappointed if you attend. Do a quick search for Affiliate Summit wrap-up posts and you will see that people rave about it year after year.

Thanks to Affiliate Summit, I have a Networking Plus pass to be able to give away. The Networking Plus Pass was formerly known as the Gold Pass and gets you the following: Admission to Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions; access to all recorded session videos; and PowerPoint presentations.

Enter the contest by clicking on the link below and answering why you would like to attend Affiliate Summit. The contest will end May 29th at 11:59pm Eastern. One winner will be chosen by me.  Winner will be notified and must accept the pass by June 1, otherwise a new winner will be chosen. Please only enter if you intend to attend. If you are awarded a pass and register with it but do not check in, you will be ineligible for future complimentary passes. The pass is not transferable.

Hope to see you at Affiliate Summit!

Click here to enter the Affiliate Summit East Giveaway.

Affiliate Programs with Disney Merchandise

Sometimes as affiliate marketers we feel like we are stuck promoting specific merchants, even when we think the terms of those merchants are not exactly “affiliate friendly.” It may be that the commissions are low or that the cookies are short. Or maybe we just cannot get the attention of the affiliate managers when we have problems. If the merchant fits our niche well, do we just accept the terms and promote anyway? Do we give up on the niche? I don’t think we do either. Instead, we get creative and look for alternatives.

One of the merchants that I hear a lot about (because of my own personal interests and those of my friends) is Disney. There have been a lot of complaints in forums about the Disney Store affiliate program as well as the Disney Movie Club affiliate program (which I do not think is even managed by Disney and shows up on a lot of CPA networks). It’s the perfect example of an opportunity to find alternatives because there is no shortage of Disney merchandise, especially when you widen your search. Here are some great merchants to look at not just for Disney but for any niche you want to find alternatives for.

• Ticket and Travel sites. Promote hotel rooms, tickets, and even excursions for the Disney Cruise Line. Surprisingly, you can find opportunities even through niche merchants like Viator.
• Jewelry. Chamilia now has an affiliate program, so you can promote the Disney charms directly through them. Check out the Swarovski program on buy.at for beautiful officially licensed Disney jewelry. Take it a step further with jewelry boxes from MusicBoxAttic.com.
• T-shirts. Shirt licensing must be cheap because I see official shirts for Disney and other characters everywhere from the drugstore to the Fashion Mall. It’s nice because you can find products in a range of prices and designs and can pick and choose between merchants.
• Checks. You might think that people are using fewer checks, but it is a HUGE affiliate marketing niche. Between just a few of the biggest check websites you will find licensed checks for thousands of different images from Disney to sports to movies.
• Media. Depending upon your merchant type preference, you can find books, magazines, and DVDs at literally thousands of merchants. Consider even merchants that sell media used if your site focuses on bargains or deals.
• Seasonal merchants. Even though we tend to think of sites like BuyCostumes.com at Halloween, they are actually a great source of branded merchandise throughout the year. Consider how costumes and party supplies can be used year round.

As a general rule, the bigger the brand, the less leverage you are going to have as the average affiliate. Because of that, you should consider niche alternatives for comparison of commissions, cookie lengths, and promotional opportunities.

Do you have merchants that you feel you need to promote but wish you had alternatives? What have you done to find them? Any affiliate managers or OPMs feel like you have programs particularly suited to affiliates like us?

The other day Nathan Smith from Zynali Marketing Solutions commented on my “When Pinterest Met Affiliate Marketing” webinar post about how Pinterest was starting to strip the tags out of Amazon affiliate links. Shawn Collins tested it out and verified it. However, he was able to go in and edit the link properly. Today Shawn reported that all of his Amazon links on Pinterest are now going to the “spam page” notification below.

Clicking through other people’s links, it looks like Pinterest is temporarily blocking all Amazon links as spam. Interestingly, I used PrettyLinks to build a redirect for an Amazon link using my www.tricia.me domain. Pinterest still recognized the final destination (Amazon) domain as “spam” and killed the link. Although it’s possible that it is just a glitch, this raises some big flags for affiliate marketers using Pinterest.

• Pinterest can at any time block any domain and render everything that you have pinned from that domain useless. Be careful how much time you spend pinning links to other sites because in one flip of a switch they can all go dead.
• Pinterest is clearly watching for too many pins from one source. Don’t get your own domain flagged for spam for having too many spammy pins.
• Use redirects for all affiliate links. You can always direct the links to another domain from the back end if the end domain does get blocked. You’ll just need to find the same product through a different merchant.
• Although this will probably get switched back because Amazon needs to place nice with Pinterest, it is likely that Pinterest will continue to strip out the affiliate links. Pinterest is onto affiliate markets and can very easily strip our coding from naked links. It would not be hard for them to do a search and replace of our affiliate codes for any network and substitute them with their own if they want.

There isn’t any reason that we all can’t participate in Pinterest in different ways to boost our traffic and our revenue. But Pinterest is not going to allow affiliate marketers to ruin their site (and should not!). Are you an affiliate, merchant, or OPM using Pinterest to build your business? How far should Pinterest go to protect itself from us?

Over the last month I have spoken and written frequently about my Mastermind Group. I’ve been fortunate enough to be learning from and working with Todd Farmer and Eric Nagel for about 15 months. For the first year we met once a week as a traditional Mastermind Group. Around our one year anniversary, we spoke about the topic at Affiliate Summit. On that day things took a different turn for us when we decided to expand our relationship to create a site together. Although we have kept it all under wraps until now, Eric did tease about it a little bit in his post Pros and Cons of Working Together. We’re finally ready to spill the beans!

Wine Club Group

Over the last three months we have been combining our talents to create the Wine Club Group. I’m not sure which of them came up with the initial concept, but as soon as I heard it I knew that it would be a winner. I love working with Todd and Eric….and I love wine (but don’t ask me to choose between them). We started with the general idea and added an extra meeting each week so that the new venture would not eclipse our usual mastermind group time.

During the last three months we sketched out the full range of sites we eventually plan to include under the Wine Club Group. Then we held brainstorming calls and started dividing up tasks. We used tools like Dropbox to stay organized and met weekly for status updates. We launched on our official soft launch date and have spent the time since then evaluating SEO and design until we reached a point that we were willing to put our names behind the sites.

Although we don’t have every single bell and whistle added to the site yet (knowing us…we’ll be changing and adding for as long as the sites exist), we are excited to be able to show it to our friends. Our primary work up until this point, aside from the underlying foundation of the sites, has been in doing wine club reviews. I can’t believe how much I have learned about wine clubs in such a short time. Did you know that there is a bacon and wine club??

What Next?

We have so many ideas about where to take the sites. As affiliate marketers, we see potential just about everywhere. I’ve been loving all that I have been able to do with our wine Pinterest boards. On the sites themselves, we’re creating incredibly cool content that I know that wine lovers are going to appreciate. The keys to our success will be to continue with as much enthusiasm as we have had so far, to keep our eyes open for opportunities for the sites, and to use everything we have in our collective arsenals to promote the sites.

You may have noticed that the title of this article is “Our First Joint Venture.” Between our usual Mastermind work, our Affiliate Summit presentation, and our new wine sites, we’ve struck gold in finding a group that works well together. It is my sincere hope that this is just the beginning for us!

Now get out there and start liking our pages and pinning our pictures and all that fun stuff. Tell us what you think and whether you have considered a joint venture with other affiliate marketers or your mastermind group. The possibilities are endless.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that it has resolved its first deceptive advertising action against an entity described as an “Affiliate Network.” The settlement with the COPEAC network (known to affiliate marketers as a “CPA Network”) was the first of its kind since the FTC began cracking down on false or deceptive advertising by affiliate marketers. Whereas previously the merchant was held liable for the actions of the affiliates, this time the affiliate network itself was implicated both for its own actions and those of its affiliates.

Some key takeaways from this announcement:

• The actions were regarding health-related claims on affiliate sites (acai berry and colon cleanse) that were made to look like news sites.
• The actions were instituted as a result of consumer complaints.
• The actions were settled by a consent decree that the FTC and the defendants entered into rather than a full litigation of the cases.
• Affiliate Network was defined as “any person who provides any Defendant with Affiliates for an Affiliate Program or whom any Defendant contracts with as an Affiliate to promote any good or service.” This would mean that CPS networks are included as well as CPA networks.
• “Endorsement” was defined as “any advertising message…that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser.”
• “Material connection” was defined as “any relationship that materially affects the weight or credibility of any endorsement and that would not reasonably be expected by consumers.”
• As in past FTC documents, we see the language that the “endorser” must disclose “clearly and prominently” the “material connection.“
• The Defendants will have to submit to the FTC certain documentation for any company that they might have an ownership interest in that would be impacted by the settlement compliance obligations for the next twenty years.
  

Although this situation was definitely an egregious one because it was clearly false advertising of unproven claims and was made to look like legitimate news, it does raise issues about the extent to which affiliate networks will be liable alongside affiliates and merchants who engage in these practices. In addition, it reiterates some of the things that the FTC has said in the past. Namely, the FTC is not out looking for sites that fail to disclose affiliate links. Instead, it is relying upon consumer claims to bring the sites to their attention. When the sites are brought to their attention, the FTC looks to the issues of “clear and prominent” disclosure of material relationships.

Do you think that this will bring about a change in the way that affiliate networks work with affiliates and merchants? At a minimum, I think that the networks need to:

• Include disclosure language in their network agreements
• Link out to the official FTC guidelines on the issues
• Monitor the types of merchants that are joining their networks, in particular those most susceptible to false advertising claims like health and beauty merchants
• Stay clear of creating landing pages and PPC ads themselves that might trigger closer scrutiny of themselves rather than just the actions of the affiliates.

The water is still murky but we all need to do what we can to make sure that we are not on the receiving end of one of these FTC actions because they threaten not only current revenue but apparently the business that we do for decades to come.

Affiliate Marketing and Pinterest

When I first wrote my post about Pinterest and Skimlinks, I had no idea how big the issue would become and how much would happen with Pinterest in a very short time. The Pinterest/Skimlinks story hit the mainstream media and Pinterest ended up removing Skimlinks from the site. Just as that settled down, a new storm started brewing over Pinterest and copyright. I started getting questions from merchants and affiliates alike about the legalities and ethics of Pinterest as well as how affiliates and merchants could be using Pinterest. So when I was approached by Affiliate Summit to do a webinar, I decided it would be the fastest way to get as much information out there as possible.

Below is the video playback of that webinar, “When Pinterest Met Affiliate Marketing.” Here are the basics of what it covered:

• What Is Pinterest? (Explanation and Demographics)
• Rise of Pinterest
• Legalities of Pinterest (Pinterest Terms of Service, Pin Etiquette, Copyright Law, and the FTC Guidelines for Affiliates)
• Pinterest and Skimlinks (No more!)
• Make Your Site Pin-Worthy and Pin-able
• Backlink Building
• Finding Pin Sources
• Contests on Pinterest
• Adding Affiliate Links to Pins
• Merchant Tips
• Bonus Tips (Gift Guides, Creating Boards, Hashtags, YouTube Videos)

Whether or not you agree that Pinterest is increasing conversions, the huge growth of the site and rise in popularity cannot be ignored. Are you using Pinterest for your business or do you think it is just a flash in the pan? Where do you stand on the ethical and legal considerations?

Who Tips the Scale in Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliates versus affiliate managers versus merchants. Who wins? Don’t we all have to balance together to be successful? Although I would argue that we do, I don’t think everyone would agree.

This week while I was complaining about merchants who lower commissions without notice or cause (HBO, Discovery Channel, etc), an affiliate manager was complaining to me about affiliates who demand higher commission rates without proving that they can convert. We went back and forth each telling our “war stories” of the week and complaining about the other side. “Don’t merchants understand that we as affiliates can just choose to promote someone else?” “Don’t affiliates understand that affiliate marketing is about paying for performance?”

What it boils down to is that we all need to be fair with our expectations. Sometimes things will happen unexpectedly to skew the balance. But on the whole there should be a fairness on each side and an understanding that we will all earn more if we work together better. When a merchant lowers its commission rate  to save money, it needs to know that it might end up losing a lot of affiliates and with that a part of its reputation. Is it a risk the merchant is willing to take? When an affiliate refuses to promote a merchant because the merchant will not give an exclusive coupon code or VIP commission, the affiliate needs to think about the reasons why that merchant cannot or will not give those things and if the affiliate truly deserves them.

Affiliate marketing is about business relationships but also personal relationships. It’s about negotiation and compromise. Should the merchant hold all of the cards because at any time it can cut the commission of the affiliate to 1% with a 5 hour cookie (I’m talking to you, FAO Schwartz)? Does the affiliate hold all the cards because he can out-SEO the merchant and send customers to a competitor?

Too many people think that their side is the one in complete control in affiliate marketing and refuse to take the time to see the opposite perspective. Do you think one side or the other controls the balance in affiliate marketing? If so, is it justified?

This has been one of those weeks where I feel like I am missing everything because I am running days behind. The good news is that although this post was supposed to be up on Monday, we all still have a chance to help! Breast cancer awareness is a cause very close to my heart (see why I am Walking 40 Miles to Raise Money for Breast Cancer). Because of that, I helped come up with an idea along with a group of affiliate marketers to sell our Kindle books this week with all of the profits going to Affiliate Marketers Give Back.

Purchase any of the books listed on the Books4Boobies website before February 18 and the authors will donate their profits to AMGB. There are a variety of different books, but I’ll highlight the ones below that are most pertinent to our industry. The 4 that I contributed to are at the top.

SEO for Blogs (Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, Eric Nagel, Tricia Meyer) Basic Search Engine Optimization techniques that every blogger should be utilizing. This came from a podcast that the 4 of us did.

Choosing the Scope and Structure of Your Blog (Deborah Carney, Tricia Meyer, Liz Fogg) Starting a new blog? This is the transcript of a podcast in which the 3 of us discussed issues like self-hosting, which platform you should use, and how to determine the topic for your site.

Internet Marketing From the Real Experts (Shawn Collins, Missy Ward, and The Gang of 88) Collection of affiliate, email, blogging, podcasting, video, search engine, and social network rock stars that break down the how and why of Internet marketing in a clear, easy to understand way.

The only print book in this book fundraiser is: It’s All About the Cookies (Mary Poiley, Missy Ward, and Jen Goode) A mouth-watering collection of recipes and thought-provoking insights affiliate marketers learned on their road to success – an interesting read and a wonderful addition to your own kitchen.

Affiliate Marketing: The Complete Guide for Beginners (Affiliate Marketing – Mastering Internet Marketing) (Todd Farmer) This guide is designed to teach you the basics of Affiliate Marketing. I want you to understand how it works, who the players are, and how you fit in.

MyContentPro’s Cheap-Ass Guide to Online Content (Online Content for Marketers) (Todd Farmer) Content for your website or online marketing project is a critical component for success. The goal of this eBook is to help you get the content you need, at the lowest price. Many of the sources and strategies uncovered in this eBook provide content for your websites, 100% Free.

Internet Marketing for Business Answers (Jim Kukral) The absolute best way to learn how to grow a successful business is to pay attention to how the experts have done it before you. Internet Marketing for Business Answers, the Small Business Expert Interviews edition puts you into a private one-on-one session with over 16 of the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs on the Web.

No Publisher Needed – Crowdfunding Your Book – How I Raised Over $30k in 30-Days To Pre-Fund My New Book (Jim Kukral) You don’t need an agent or a publisher to make your new book a success. You can use the power of the crowd to pre-fund your book and create your own virtual signing bonus. That’s what I did. I raised over $30k in 30-days for my new book series. Want to know how to do it? That’s what this book is all about.

The Basics of Affiliate Success: Running a Business (Top Secrets of Successful Affiliate Marketing) (Billy Kay) Affiliates always joke that they make money in their bathrobes, and that affiliate marketing is “easy money”! But in reality, it IS… a business. If run it like a business, it can succeed. Billy offers these business tricks and tips to help establish, grow and sustain your affiliate marketing career.

Follow Me: Making Money with Blogging, Facebook Marketing & Twitter for Business (Dave Cupples) Former NSW Young Entrepreneur of the Year, SMX Idol Winner and International Speaker Dave Cupples shares leading Social Media case studies from around the world and the most effective tools and actionable cutting edge tips for businesses to skyrocket new leads and supercharge revenue using Facebook, Twitter and Blogging. Includes Tips & Tools to incentivize Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers & Blog Subscribers, How to spy on competitors and copy their most effective tactics, Tips & Tools to get your content shared by influencers and much more!

Best Practices for Coupon Sites (Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, Kim Salvino, Amy Ely, and Jeannine Crooks)

Best Practices for Creating Your Affiliate Agreement (Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, Eric Nagel)

Facebook + Email = Success (Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, Dave Cupples and David Iwanow)

Should Pinterest Disclose It Is Making Money?

Since the beginning of January, discussions about Pinterest have taken off everywhere. From my Bunco group to Affiliate Summit, everyone is talking about it for some reason. Initially it was because it was a cool, fun site that all my mom friends were using. Then it was because my affiliate marketing friends discovered a way to get traffic and make money from it. Now it’s because everyone thinks that they have been “misled” by Pinterest in some way. I have to voice my opposing view because it doesn’t seem like many people are.

At issue: Pinterest is converting user-generated links to merchants into affiliate links via a service called Skimlinks. As a result, Pinterest will make money if anyone makes a purchase through those links. In addition, affiliate marketers are creating links themselves and fear that their links may get overwritten by Pinterest’s affiliate links.

My disclosure: I’m a Pinterest user. I’m an affiliate marketer. I’m a Skimlinks dabbler.

The Affiliate Argument: I don’t think affiliate marketers have a right to be angry about anything. We’re using someone else’s site to try to make money ourselves. We never had a deal with Pinterest to begin with that we could place our money-making links on their site. If they do end up overwriting them, we can’t complain. They never said that we could place them there. We were taking advantage of their system and their traffic to make money. And we didn’t disclose it to anyone–Pinterest, our merchants, or all of the Pinterest users who click on our links. If it works out for us, great! If it doesn’t, it was a risk we chose to take understanding the way that social sites work.

The Pinterest User Argument: Pinterest users feel duped that Pinterest was making money off of them and they didn’t know it. From my perspective, we don’t have an argument there for a lot of reasons.

• It’s a free service with lots of great functions. Surely everyone realizes that Pinterest had to make money somehow. There are no advertisements on the site. They aren’t selling our email addresses to anyone. How would they be making money?
• The only links that they are making money on are the ones that you create to a merchant site. So you are already copying the content from the merchant when you “pin” it to Pinterest. How can you complain that it was your content to start with and Pinterest shouldn’t make money off of it?
• Pinterest doesn’t in any way encourage you to buy anything through their links. They don’t review the merchandise. Your friends do. If you buy something, it’s not because Pinterest convinced you to, it’s because your friends did.
• If you are going to buy the item anyway as a result of what you learned from the Pinterest site, why not allow Pinterest to make some money off of it? You don’t lose anything when they make money.
• If you are pinning your own actual, unique content from your own website, Pinterest is not making any money off of it.
• Do you know how many other sites make money off of you when you click on their links? Coupon sites don’t post coupons for you just to make you happy. Price comparison sites don’t exist just to help you out. Even a lot of forums let you chat away for free about whatever you want but then overwrite some of your words with Skimlinks. They all have affiliate links and make money when you click on their links and most of them don’t tell you. Are you complaining about those sites?

The Disclosure Issue: For some people, this is where it gets murky. Does Pinterest have to disclose that they are using affiliate links? The issue of disclosure in affiliate marketing is not clear. We do have to let our visitors know that we are setting cookies on their computers that collect certain data. The Pinterest Privacy Policy takes care of that. We also must not deceive our customers into buying something when we have a financial relationship with the seller. Pinterest isn’t representing anything at all. They aren’t writing reviews of products; the other users are. They aren’t encouraging you to visit merchant sites; the other users are. Does the fact that Pinterest might make money off of you if you make a purchase in some way take away from the experience that you are having on the site? I just can’t see why it would. The FTC Guides are about endorsements and testimonials, not links in general.

I’m truly interested in listening to opposing points of view on this. I’m sure that Pinterest will come out with some kind of disclosure policy just to make their users happy. They may also add something about affiliate links in general to their terms to warn affiliates about how they are treating their links. It would be helpful, but I don’t understand why it is required.

Links to other informational articles on the subject:

Pinterest is quietly generating revenue by modifying user submitted pins.

How Pinterest is secretly profiting from your links

What Affiliates and Merchants Should Know About Pinterest Links

While I was away at Affiliate Summit, the State of Indiana was making a pretty big deal that could have an impact on my business. Governor Mitch Daniels announced last week that Amazon and Indiana have reached an agreement whereby Amazon will begin collecting sales tax for purchases in Indiana starting in 2014. Although the issue does not directly impact affiliate marketers in the state, I see it as fairly good news. Unfortunately, a new affiliate tax bill has also now been written.

Why was the Amazon agreement good for affiliates? First of all, much of the argument in favor of taxing all online purchases in Indiana was based on Amazon having fulfillment centers here. The issue of whether true out-of-state merchants whose only contact with Indiana are its affiliates became muddied into the discussion. The average voter/consumer did not understand where the physical location argument stopped and the alleged “nexus” argument began.  (See my full post Internet Tax Looming in Indiana?)

Second, while numbers are very speculative, as much as 1/3 of the total amount of uncollected state sales taxes as a result of online purchases in Indiana will now be collected by Amazon. That significantly lowers the total amount uncollected, which makes it less lucrative for the state to pass an affiliate tax that would result in affiliates losing their income. It’s even more likely that the state would lose money overall now if it were to pass an affiliate tax.

Third, we at least know that if an affiliate tax is passed, we will not be dropped as Amazon affiliates.

Why wasn’t the agreement good for affiliates? First, we no longer have Amazon fighting on our side since they will be collecting the taxes anyway. Second, the issue continues to get so much attention that a new House Bill (No. 1119) was introduced January 9, 2012, and referred to the Committee on Ways and Means that would require out of state merchants to collect sales tax if they have affiliates in the state. The language specifically includes as affiliates of retailer anyone who “whether by a link on an Internet web site, an in-person oral presentation, or otherwise, to the retail merchant.” Although it includes exclusions, similar ones in other states were not enough to keep merchants from dropping affiliates.

This isn’t the first time that Indiana state legislators have pushed for an internet tax, and in the past it has not gotten anywhere. We need to continue to contact our state legislators and support Senator Luke Kenley, who has been at the forefront of the push for federal legislation.

We’ll be discussing this issue further at the Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup on January 31 at RAM in Fishers. Please RSVP if you are interested in attending.