The Industry Review

This Wednesday I’m giving a two hour introductory talk about affiliate marketing. This is following my plan to start doing more speaking engagements which I enjoy (as mentioned in my post about my talk at Social Media 201).

 
Preparing my Powerpoint deck was fun although it was somewhat time consuming. I also prepared a resource page for the audience.

 
I don’t know exactly the demographics of this blog’s visitors (clearly Alexa is untrustworthy, as I’ve joked about): I would estimate that at least a quarter are seasoned affiliate marketers, another quarter is friends, and the rest are people I meet through Twitter or people who Google for certain topics I’ve written about – Twitter Jail being the most popular (of course, it’s possible to be both a friend, an affiliate marketer, and know me from Twitter 🙂 ).

 
Since I took the time to make this resource list, I figured, why not share it? If you’re an affiliate marketer, you can stop now because at least 95% are things you know, and know well (however, I AM sure most marketers aren’t familiar with the Mobile CPA Network I joined, for example). But if you’re not… proceed.

 
I think I will make more of these introductory posts, explaining resources for building links and other things new affiliate marketers require. But that’s for another time.

 

“Standard” Affiliate networks

These are networks dedicated to physical products or eBooks.
Clickbank Sign up page – eBooks, eCourses
ShareASale sign up page – physical products
Linkshare sign up page – physical products
Linkconnector sign up page – physical products
Commission Junction sign up page – physical products

 

CPA networks

Here are some of my favorite CPA networks: harder to get into than other networks, and normally require a brief phone interview before being approved.
Neverblue sign up page
Marketleverage sign up page
Azoogleads sign page
Clickbooth sign up page
Copeac sign up page

 

Mobile CPA networks

This is a CPA affiliate network dedicated to mobile offers. I am aware of two more such networks, but since I have not used them myself (yet), I’m not listing them.
Sponsormob sign up page

 

Offer directory

An excellent resource for finding offers and comparing commissions across networks.
Offervault

 

PPC: Keyword spying tools

If you’re doing any PPC at all, you really need a keyword spying tool. I used PPCBully 2.0 and thought it’s great.
PPCBully 2.0
Affportal – has a lot of useful tools for PPC campaigns

 

SEO/Blogging: Keyword research tools

If you’re creating search engine optimized niche sites you must do your keyword research.
Micro Niche Finder: superb tool, and even has a ‘brainstorming’ function which just finds good niches for you on its own.
Market Samurai: superb tool which just gets better.
Google Keyword Tool: a good place to start

 

SEO: Link building

eZArticleLink: If you need links, this is a good resource – there’s even a free version!

 

Pay Per View Networks

I included only some of the PPV networks I use.. since this is an introductory talk, I’m not sure I would recommend on PPV being the starting point. However, I didn’t want to leave this out.
DirectCPV
AdOn Network
MediaTraffic

 

Pay Per View Resources

If one does do PPV then Affportal is a must. An absolutely fantastic – and mandatory – resource for PPV which just gets better.
Affportal

 

Email marketing Resources

Here too I only mentioned the one tool I use. Yes, there are others, but this one is the best.
Aweber – best email marketing tool

 

Twitter resources

This is probably better phrased as ‘Twitter monetization resources’.
Ad.ly
SponsoredTweets

 

Media Buying resources

This is useful for anyone doing demographics research for the purpose of media buying. Most definitely not for new or even intermediate affiliates!
Alexa
Quantcast
Compete

 

Domain registration

I registered more than 60 domains with Namecheap and don’t have a single complaint. They’re also the cheapest. In fact, I’m going to register one, possibly two, domains right after I finish this blog post…
Namecheap

 

Domain hosting

Unlike domain registration, I’ve had my share of hosting accounts and was very unhappy with most. However, Hostgator is excellent: very good service, high reliability, quick and friend customer support. Definitely better than the other accounts I used. Even their pricing is competitive!
Hostgator

 

Facebook advertising resources

Since it’s hard to do split-testing with Facebook because there is no way for the average user to get a bulk upload tool, the Facebook Ad Manager is a must in order to do any serious Facebook advertising.
FB Ad Manager

 

 
Credit to both pictures here belong to Drew Bennett (@BenSpark), who shows everyday photos on his blog.

 
I was warned that day 2 is going to be even tougher than day 1, fortunately, this proved to be wrong. The day started by a very inspiring keynote presentation by Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan) and Julien Smith (@Julien)

 
The Meet Market, if anything, was less hectic than before even though there were (supposedly) more people and many new vendors. I spoke to representatives from Linkshare, Azoogleads, Commission Junction, Linkconnector, Clickbooth, Clickbank, Copeac, Shareasale, MediaWhiz and some other networks I’m not a member of (and probably some I am a member of and simply forgot). By now I was used to networking (not that I’m ever bad at it), but was handling it like a used car salesman. I literally patted myself on the back.

 
One of the nice thing about the summit is that they offered a mentor/mentee program. Since I’m new to this industry, and historically whenever I made mistakes, they were a result of lack of information (and because of not planning ahead or bad judgment), I figured this could be both helpful and fun. Jen Goode (@Jgoode), the organizer, assigned me to Jay Berkowitz (@JayBerkowitz), one of the speakers, and owner of Ten Golden Rules, an internet marketing consulting firm.

 

 
Jay turned out not only to be a superb mentor, but also a really, really nice guy. He also gave a very interesting talk where he discussed 10 emerging trends that will likely to dominate next year, 2010. After his talk was over, Jay and I had a very interesting discussion in which he interviewed me for his podcast series; in the podcast we discussed the advice he gave me, how I implemented it (“Perfectly” according to him), and how extremely helpful it could be for other people as well. I intend to dedicate a separate post to our discussions and the advice he gave me, as well as provide a link once it’s up.

 

Later I went on to MarketLeverage’s pizza party with John Chow (@JohnChow). This event was organized by Dina (@MLDina) and was a lot of fun.

 
It’s quite funny, the highlight of the summit – for me – were the two MarketLeverage events. However, I’m not even a MarketLeverage affiliate! How Ironic 😉

 
Even though there were plenty of parties afterwards, I really felt the need to go home, rest a bit, and see my son. What’s the point of living 15 minutes away from a conference if you don’t get to see your family? (By the time I got home on Sunday both my wife and son were already asleep). I mean, who can resist this cute little face? 😉

 
My summary of day 1

My summary of day 2

My summary of day 3