ASW11 SAS Photobooth with Kim Rowley

In no particular order, here are 10 of the 100+ things that gave me a good laugh in Vegas.

1) Shawn Collins in the Patriot jersey. On the one hand, it was a sad moment for all of us AFC fans. On the other hand, knowing Shawn, it was pretty darn funny. And I won’t even start in about his “short pants….”

2) Not being able to find the Blogger Lounge for 2 hours. It was totally, completely my fault. I started feeling like I should be saying “Look, kids, Big Ben, Parliament” as I went around in circles seeing the same people over and over. I think maybe I was too busy socializing to find a map.

3) Jason Rubacky and the Jazzy. Jason could #GetSome serious senior citizen action rolling on that thing.

4) Trying to figure out how the curtains opened at the Wynn. Yep, I’m from Indiana.

5) Tiny coffee cups with baby spoons at lunch. The desserts were cute as could be, but watching people eat them was kind of a Gulliver’s Travels moment. (The book, not the movie. I haven’t seen the movie)

6) Trivia night and how competitive but not at all really competitive all my friends are. Did I mention that my team won?

7) The scared look on the faces of the merchants in the audience  by the end of our Inside the Minds of Affiliates panel. We really didn’t mean to sound so grumpy. I promise I’ll be nicer if you email me. (Just don’t try to call me)

8 ) Putting on every single hat, boa, and pair of glasses in the ShareASale Photo Booth with Kim Rowley. And the number of people who asked if they could have a copy of the pictures that we took when I told them that we were making out in there.

9 ) My (non)sighting of Charlie Sheen before the Tuesday keynote and the fact that people back in Indiana actually believed it because it was retweeted so much. (Thank you, Erik Hom)

10) At least 50% of every conversation that I had with OPMs, affiliate managers, networks, and fellow affiliates. Each of you brought me so much joy that I couldn’t help but laugh at least a little. And I have to mention Eric Nagel specifically for putting up with more of my giggling than anyone else.

Thanks as always to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for giving us an environment in which we can both work and have fun, ensuring that we will be back time and time again!

As the owner of a rewards site, I do not have a choice but to work with many different affiliate networks. That said, if I had the choice I probably wouldn’t work with a few of them. Affiliate managers and merchants often ask me which networks I like and which I do not like. Rather than complain about what I don’t like, I decided to put together my “dream network,” or what it would look like to take the best components of each and put them all together.

(As a bit of background, I’m not a “Super Affiliate” by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have some good niches and databases. I don’t market to a million people or do paid search at all. I’m pretty much your average content affiliate.)

Personal Communication: Hands down, ShareASale and buy.at do the best job of communicating on a one-on-one basis with affiliates. They make it easiest to talk to them via email, forum, Twitter, Facebook, and just about any other way that I could possibly want to talk to them. I know that I can get in touch with at least one person with either of these networks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Troubleshooting and Problem Solving: In a way this goes along with communication, but ShareASale definitely stands out for this. I’ve sent messages via ABW forum or Twitter and gotten responses from the management team there within an hour. Actual responses to my questions and not just passing the buck. Some networks make you wait 1-2 business days for responses. That isn’t acceptable when our industry never stops. Even worse, some of the networks hide behind “help desk” email addresses and names and you can’t just communicate with someone until you get an issue resolved. It’s infuriating and it can result in lost revenue for all of us (Linkshare, I’m talking to you specifically on this one). Trouble ticket/help desk systems can work well when there is accountability behind them but they aren’t helpful when you have emergency situations or not actual point of contact.

Finding and Applying to Merchants: While no one network stands out for this, some are definitely better than others. Commission Junction makes it easy to search for and apply to a whole list of merchants at once. I also seem to get good results on my search terms, even if I do not know the exact merchant name that I am looking for.

Coupons and Discounts: This is huge for us at Sunshine Rewards and we need to automate as much as possible. It doesn’t do us any good when we get hot coupons but can only download them once a day. We end up loading the coupons manually from the emails before we can download as much as 24 hours later. Because of this, I favor the networks that allow coupons to be downloaded as they are added such as Linkshare and ShareASale. The one way that Google excels in that they allow you to decide which types of coupons and discounts you want to download.

Reporting: Obviously most affiliates are going to favor real-time reporting over batch reporting. I like when I can manipulate the data in different ways easily. ShareASale and buy.at are the best for transactions coming up quickly. Commission Junction is great for allowing easy downloads that can be manipulated in different ways. Linkshare has the easiest way to find individual product sales, which can be important for some of my niche sites.

Credit Disputing: Often we have to report when we do not get credit for a purchase. Some networks do not have a mechanism for this at all. Both Linkshare and Commission Junction make it easy to file disputes for credits, and Linkshare even lets you “escalate” a denial for further review. This helps keep track of outstanding issues and ensure that they are actually getting to the merchants.

Newsletters: I would much rather get links in a newsletter than have to click on the “Get Link” in an email to generate the links. I don’t know how much this depends on the affiliate manager, but it seems like the Google, ShareASale, and Linkshare links are most likely to come right in the newsletter. I also like the ability that some networks have to send the newsletters to multiple people in my company because I am not the one who pulls the coupon links from the newsletters.

Video: I haven’t been using too many videos through the networks lately, but ShareASale makes it easiest for me to add their links to my own videos and many of their merchants have video links now. buy.at has a new video tool but I honestly haven’t used it because I haven’t come across any good videos for merchants that I am running with them. Video on the networks doesn’t matter too much to me because I find people click on the links around the embedded video anyway.

Advanced Tools: I love the Linkshare LinkGenerator and CouponSnap. As a blogger, there is nothing simpler than navigating to a page and then clicking on the little box on my browser to generate my link. If every network had these, I would do a lot more product reviews. ShareASale offers a pretty easy way to generate a link to a specific page as well, although you do need to go into the interface and do it. I like that deep linking functionality to pages where I want to refer my visitors to a full category of products. All of the networks are hit or miss to me on how easy it is to pull links for individual products. It seems that a lot of that comes down to the merchants as well.

I could go on for hours about other features and each of the networks specifically, but you would get pretty bored. These hit the high points for me. What would your dream network look like?

Once upon a time when I was in the corporate world, I loved reading “Who Moved My Cheese?” with my teams. I loved when things changed because I saw opportunities. But I didn’t think that the book applied to me now that I am an affiliate and own my own business. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

As it turns out, the cheese gets moved more in affiliate marketing than when I worked for Lexis. I have to remember that every move means a new challenge that can take me down a different path. Look around. Isn’t the new Shareasale toolbar policy really just someone moving my cheese? It means not only evaluating my own company’s non-use (or use) of toolbars but to what extent we need to educate our visitors better about them. It means looking at where we are in industry and where we want to be.

But toolbars aren’t the only thing. I was reading Scott Jangro’s post about affiliate links in Twitter. Extending it out to other conversations now going on is the use of affiliate links on Facebook. These are new opportunities for us. We can choose to follow the path of monetizing our Twitter and Facebook accounts or continue along the road of viewing them only as pure social networking.

Each twist and turn in affiliate marketing can be scary because it’s my livelihood. On the flip side, it keeps my business fresh because I always have to be on the lookout for the next big thing. So go ahead and move my cheese. I’m up to the challenge and, in fact, looking forward to it!

Last month at Affiliate Summit West, I had the pleasure of leading a round table discussion about affiliate created video. At first I worried that I didn’t possibly have enough to say to fill a whole hour. But as I began putting together my notes, I realized that I could have talked for hours!

Because this wasn’t a formal ASW09 presentation, it was not recorded for their site. However, Angie did take some video with her Flip and has been formatting it for me a piece at a time. Here is the first 10 minutes of the round table discussion. In it, we talk about different types of videos that affiliates might want to create including product and merchant reviews, how-to-videos, weekly updates, and viral videos. In addition, we started talking about how we can tell how many people are watching our whole videos and the Shareasale video technology. Lastly, we talked briefly about the use of videos on Facebook.

Thanks to some of my friends for attending and helping keep the discussion interesting.

Before I got into affiliate marketing, I have to admit that I really like toolbars. I liked being reminded where to shop and get deals. But after I became an affiliate and started getting educated, I realized that those toolbars were a convenience for me at the expense of people who worked really hard on their websites.

Naturally when I started a cash back site, I didn’t even contemplate a toolbar. I knew from a few different sources that the rewards sites with toolbars were looked at as “evil” and parasitic. It became the “good guys” versus the “bad guys.” But has that all changed?

Shareasale (one of my favorite networks) is having a series of discussions regarding changing its terms of service regarding toolbars. A number of merchants and affiliates (who I consider to be clean and ethical) have stepped up to say that they think the time is right to evaluate new technologies. Others are EXTREMELY opposed to the mere suggestion.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and I hope to have a seat in the front row because it will impact my business heavily. If you would like to read more information straight from the source, check out the ShareASale Blog.