Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Rakuten LinkShare Report Good for Affiliates

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Last week at its Symposium in New York, LinkShare released the results of a study commissioned by LinkShare and conducted by Forrester. The study ran from December 2011 through April 2012. You can get the full white paper entitled “Affiliate Marketing – The Direct and Indirect Value that Affiliates Deliver to Advertisers” from Linkshare.

Sometimes it can be difficult to express to potential advertisers the value of affiliate marketing. This study gives us some great ammunition. Although the sample size was not huge (526 US-based online buyers, 9 affiliates, and an unnamed number of advertisers), the methodology was sound. The respondents were made up of varied ages and household incomes. For some reason, however, almost 70% of the respondents were college graduates or post-graduate degree recipients. That seems high to me in general but may be indicative of the total demographic of “online buyers.”

Affiliate Sites Drive Shoppers

As most of us would expect, the study bore out the belief that today’s customers are driven by deals. In fact, 55% of the respondents said that they check for deals before making purchases. 43% said that promotional offers from “coupon or deal sites, blog sites, loyalty or cash-back sites” will be a determining factor if they are undecided on a purchase. An overwhelming majority will visit 2-3 nonretailer sites before making a purchase. It’s not hard to surmise that most of the sites that they are visiting to find the deals and research the purchases are affiliate sites. [Read more…]

Using Facebook’s New Promoted Posts

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After running a promotion a couple of weeks ago that resulted in some new Facebook fans, I decided to try out the Facebook Promoted/Sponsored posts advertising option for the first time. By way of background, my page has about 3800 fans–not too big, not too small. So the advertising costs were low enough to allow me to try it out a couple of times. Plus, I lucked into a $50 Facebook advertising credit for taking a quiz.

What is a Facebook Promoted Post?

When you post on your Facebook business page now, you have the option of promoting a post. A lot of other articles go into more detail on this, so I will just stick to my personal experience. (see 4 Critical Things To Know About Facebook Promoted Posts for more information). Here’s the button in case you have missed it:

Facebook Promoted Posts Button
Facebook Promoted Posts Button

You just click on that button and decide how much you want to spend and how long you want the promotion to run. [Read more…]

Affiliate Program Options for Brands Like Disney

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Disney Affiliate Programs
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. [Read more…]

Pinterest Blocking Amazon Affiliate Links?

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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.

Pinterest Amazon Spam

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?

Mastermind Success: Our First Joint Venture

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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 [Read more…]