Tag Archives: affiliate marketing

Virtual Currency: Getting Zen about Incentivized Offers

Dec
20

Hello again dear bloggers!
First of all, I would like to wish all of you a great holiday season.
All the best from all of us here at Adsmarket!!!

In my last post, Virtual Currency – Media Types for Online Games Applications, we discussed virtual currency media, and the way it can positively contribute to gaming advertisers and business models. In this post, we will explore the biggest and, some say, the pioneer market for this media type – Asia.

A few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to attend Gstar in Busan, Korea. This conference was an excellent example/reminder for gaming advertisers
concerning the potential of VC and the Asian market place. It also lent decent proportions to the western world, and the fact that over here, we are seeing just the tip of the revenue iceberg.

Believe it or not:
The virtual goods industry in Asia is generating about $7 billion a year in revenue, about seven times the number in the U.S. This means one thing: call it incentivized traffic; call it virtual currency – IT WORKS.

Asian Potential
Here are a few interesting facts:
The Asian population count now a days: 3,808,070,503 of which 738,257,230 are internet users, with a growth of 545.9 % for the past 9 years – and GROWING!This means serious business!!!

The Asian market is producing a significant volume of traffic, but there are drawbacks, to be fair.  Due to barriers like language, currency/exchange rate, and user value, however; promoting online games/MMO campaigns and optimizing them is a challenge if you are not local or familiar with the local marketplace.

Even with these challenges, the general assumption is that volume will be high, and with the right content/game you can gain users that will spend more time playing and eventually – paying.  Deeper research will show you that most developers/ games companies keep the marketing agenda for APAC in-house. The user value is outstanding, not to mention that demographic wise, this is targeting heaven.

The Fuss Over VC
Getting back to Gstar, after meeting with a few industry veterans, I was surprised to hear that they didn’t seem to understand why the western world is making such a big deal over virtual items and the way they are being distributed.

When I spoke with some of them about recent “industry-shattering” events, like when EA acquired Playfish (tiny cash deal…), Offerpal hiring a new CEO and Zynga launching Farmville.com , they didn’t seem to be excited at all…

“This has been our business model for years…” & “It’s only getting bigger by the year“ were only some of the comments I got back. 

This made me wonder: Why is the western world  still labeling virtual items as a negative feature?  What is it about two different societies that can label this controversial traffic source as a godsend or a disease?  In other words, what’s all the fuss about ???

From my experience working with large gaming advertisers for the last few years and monitoring the buzz surrounding the virtual currency platform, the issue is the way it’s being introduced to the user. And I don’t necessarily agree with it.

After all, how do advertising and marketing work?  Consumer behavior is amazingly predictable, which is what advertising is based on. Simply put, the consumers who manage their spending and take the time to read the small print are probably thinking the same thing that my friends at GStar were. What’s the fuss about? 

We should be happy that the affiliate marketing industry is growing and creating new opportunities for both users and publishers to benefit from.  We know that each media type has its own arguments, and just like any competitive industry, the online space requires thinking outside the box.

The only reason to bash on it is if you are jealous that you didn’t think about it before…

If it hasn’t been said before (and it has), here’s some advice for every online consumer – check before you click, and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

Dec
13

Learning how to choose an affiliate program is an important step to earning money

online. There is much competition among people trying to earn revenue as well as

affiliate programs to assist you in this endeavor. 



Here are the tips to choosing an affiliate program:



1. Choose programs that offer hot products – items that people are buying and

that are popular among online buyers. This is an easy step because you can learn

the trends just by reading any social media sites, blogs and watching what is selling

on auction sites for example. The only caveat is that these products change

frequently. 



2. Research the affiliate programs you are interested in. Learn if they have clear

information about their payments and if there are many complaints about them. 



3. Choose a two-tier program. This is where you earn money from the referrals

you send to the affiliate program as well as their business.



4. Make use of mentors. Even seasoned marketers need advice.For example, 

many affiliate marketers and bloggers are always willing to advise others

and make connections. Finding an affiliate program that they endorse is often a

good way to get started.



5. Choose a program that provides support that available to you via phone and

email. You want a partner to guide you along and help you to earn money and

avoid mistakes.



Deciding on the best affiliate program is vital to earning revenue and maintaining

that revenue stream. Research, get advice and make use of mentors. Soon you

may be one of the Super Affiliates too.



Connie Roberts aka ConnieFoggles is the author of 3 blogs, including 

Brain Foggles, her product review blog, and is now writing

at MurrayNewlands.com 

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Great Affiliate Industry Reads: Tips, Experts, and Need-to-Knows

Oct
01

 

Being an avid reader both online and off, I was interested to know what Adsmarketeers read to stay informed about the affiliate industry, which might help our readers and clients pick up a tip or two. So, this week I asked a question around the Adsmarket offices: “What are you reading?”, which is a dangerous question, as choices made in reading can be very revealing. Here are some recommendations from some of our team members for affiliates, advertisers, and all motived free-thinkers just like us!

Daneka Soudak (Me), Marketing Communications: “What I read for work and what I read for fun are rarely the same, but funnily enough, there are a lot of great affiliate blogs out there that I visit a lot because I simply like what they have to say about everything!”

 

 

  1. Uhuru, by Robert Ruark – My current bus-ride companion. It’s a glimpse at Kenya in the late 1950′s. I picked it up off a park bench, and it’s fascinating.
  2. Webpronews.com – A lot of coverage of everything that’s going on in web business.
  3. yoast.com – For us WordPress users, this blog from Joost deValk, creator of lots of yummy plugins, is a gem.
  4. Get Elastic – For one thing, a chick writes this one, and for another, she’s got amazing, real advice on ecommerce and online marketing.
  5. Murray Newlands - Murray manages to be everywhere at once, covering every convention, interviewing all the who’s whos.  He is very interactive with his readers too, so you can ask him anything!
  6. Dennis Yu – This guy has a ton of experience and believe in true transparency.  Affiliates and Advertisers alike will enjoy this read.
  7. GrowMap – This blog is a university of learning for those interested in social media and building a “map’ to “grow” your online business.  How to make money online? Read GrowMap!

Maor Sadra, Director of Sales: “I mostly read www.techcrunch.com. TechCrunch is a technology blog with some of the best scoops about anything and everything technology- related. The blog posts articles about anything from software to hardware, with a very nice portion dedicated to the online advertising world. It features editorials about new startups and companies, and it helps me to keep up-to-date in the world of technology and online advertising in general.”

Martin Fuchs, Sales and Business Development Manager: “Right now I’m reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
Other stuff I would highly recommend:

 

  1. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
  2. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by
    Albert-Laszlo Barabasi”

Yaron Kaplan, IT: “I read Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) – It is a good source for general information about the tech world. Although it may cause epilepsy for non-geeks.”

 

Yuval Ben-Harush, Advertiser Relations Team Leader:
“Here’s what I am reading currently:

 

 

1. Books:

2. Sites I visit all the time:

3. Newsletters I get:

Liat Arbesman, Publisher Recruitment Team Leader: “Is it enough that read 10,000 Facebook and Twitter statuses all day?”

 

 

  1. Blogs I read:
    http://www.nickycakes.com/
    Great feedback from a young, experienced, and “rough” affiliate. He said what he thinks, with no limits!
    I loved his review about the ASE O9.http://www.murraynewlands.com/
    Murry is a nice guy, has his own affiliate network and is always updated in everything, with tips for affilitaes all the time
  2. Great reads on the social networking scene, you get all the information about new events on FB , apps, games and more:
    http://www.insidesocialgames.com/
    http://www.insidefacebook.com/
  3. http://www.mediapost.com/
    http://www.clickz.com/
    http://www.abestweb.com/

Shameless plug: All of the links for books will take you to Better World Books, a site I love because they have an amazing inventory of used and new books, free shipping in the US and cheap shipping anywhere else. Also they give money from their sales to fund literacy programs around the world. So if you see something here that you want to pick up, buy from them!

 

 

Wub for Wibiya

Aug
13

The Adsmarket Blog is now in its 4th month.  Since our launch in April of 2009 we’ve seen our traffic increase each month, readers spending more and more time reading, and a genuine enthusiasm for our efforts!  Firstly, thanks are due to our excellent contributors and the affiliate marketing and online marketing insight they provide.  And also, thanks to the general energy of Adsmarket, a company with ideas up the wazoo and, needless to say, outside the proverbial box.   

 

I’d like to announce the addition of what I think it a totally fantastic feature for our readers.  For most of us online monkeys we have a repeating 5-minute online browsing cycle that we call our ‘break from work’:

  1. Check for new email
  2. Update status on facebook
  3. Check out what’s up on twitter
  4. Click links from either FB or twitter to read a blog or news article or two.
  5. Back to work…
  6. Repeat

So, we’ve recently installed the Wibiya toolbar, which displays on every page of the blog, doesn’t require installation and was brilliantly designed to keep things convenient.  What the Wibiya toolbar allows you to do is complete most of this obsessive cycle without leaving our blog!  Yay!  You can update your facebook  or twitter status  right from here, share one of our informative articles (like Maor’s post for marketers: Making a Pool out of a Puddle, which is the most popular article read on our blog, or How Green is Adsmarket? , if you are feeling particulary eco-communicative) on StumbleUpon, Mixx, or Digg, and even search Google.  It’s very convenient and my favorite, won’t open up a bunch of ugly browser windows like a lot of bookmarking clients do.
So as not to confuse you, we’ve kept some of the original functionality of the blog like our RSS in the upper right, but you are welcome to use them both.  We may remove the old ones if the toolbar proves a success so we can replace them with other useful widgets instead, but we’ll let you know.

Please let us know what you think!


Making a pool out of a puddle: advice for Advertisers

Jun
21

Maor Sadra here with a tip for Advertisers:

Advertisers measure their return on investment (ROI) by calculating how much money they spent to generate a new lead/sale and comparing it to the lifetime value of the user. In today’s online advertising world, everything can be tracked and measured to measure ROI, so why do so many Advertisers limit their use of marketing tools and splash around in the same tiny puddle they are used to?!

Why not dig in deeper and create yourself a nice pool?

I used to work at a place where almost 80% of the online media budget went to Email Marketing. Over time, this limited our abilities to increase sales, as while Email Marketing is a highly effective method, you can easily saturate a market and even damage your brand name.
So while results were great in the short run, we soon got stuck with no ability to grow as we were recycling the same media again and again… and making our little puddle quite muddy.

To solve this problem, we began expanding our reach into different channels: PPC, Banners and Lead Generation, and found that our ROI was not the same for every channel, even when using the same CPA rates. We needed to adjust the target CPA by channel, thus working on 8 markets x 4 channels = 32 different CPA targets.
As complex as this sounded, using a pool of marketing tools and not just one helped the company expand, appeal to new users that were entirely unawa

re of the brand, and reach a steady positive ROI overall.

Today, I run across too many advertisers which refuse to run on specific media types, since they’ve tested it using the same target CPA they have for their best performing media type. One thing I always ask is: “Why limit your reach when you can simply adjust your rates to compensate for your ROI targets?”
With the variety of marketing tools available online today: Banners, Email, SEO, PPC, Behavioral Targeting, Social Media and more… the potential is as limitless as the combinations! After you multiply these different channels by the amount of countries Advertisers sometimes cover and the amount of different media companies Advertisers work with, you realize you should be working with hundreds of different CPA targets!

With that said, my tip for the day, and every day, is: Test Everything! Measure your ROI by channel and re-adjust your rates to allow a steady positive ROI. A major side effect of this approach is that in the long run, the more channels you run on, the more affiliates will run your offers. One of my favorite parts of affiliate marketing is that what works for the advertiser, works for the affiliates!

So, when it comes to choosing an online ad strategy, why splash around in that dirty little puddle when you could be lounging in your pool (complete with waterfall), drinking a Jamaican Smile with a paper umbrella sticking out of it?


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Online Ad Industry Keeping Doom and Gloom at Bay

May
13

Last Friday morning’s eMarketer newsletter gave a fresh, optimistic retort to the Negative Nancys out there that have predicted financial slumping of the online ad industry. 

The leading article, entitled “No Online Ad Recession, Yet” refutes theories of financial recession from TechCrunch.  Perhaps the folks at TechCrunch are simply lowering their expectations in advance in order to brace themselves for the hit.

To support their stance, eMarketer displa

ys US revenue activity for Q1-Q4 for 2008 that is entirely in the black, with total growth assessed at 4%.  It’s not an astounding figure, but why the sad faces?

Q1 of 2009 shows the first period of downturn (7%), and only time will tell if a true recession is in the future for online marketers. 

Questions we have,  how will this affect Publishers and Advertisers that make their money through affiliate marketing?  Will merchants looking to increase their ROI while lowering their risk turn to performance networks, where they pay for results?  Will we see a sharp turn in total media spending and ad sales? 

We fully expect this industry to do what it’s known for, adapt, survive, and thrive!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this one!

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Happy Birthday Blog!

Apr
20

We are pround to announce the launch of the Adsmarket blog!

Our main objective with this blog (ooh, that sounds so corporate) is creating a space for discussion and education about all things in the affiliate marketing world. We’ll also share updates and news about our company’s inner workings. Contributors will include everyone from account managers to tech support and management, and we’ll share photos and clips from our participation at exhibitions and events.

So hey, welcome! It’s worth signing up to our RSS feed so you won’t miss a thing.