Comparison of Affiliate Creatives and Importance of Assortment

When setting up an affiliate program, each merchant/advertiser gets to a point when they need to decide which creatives to offer affiliates to use for the promotion of the merchant’s products/services. If I were to rank merchant creatives in order of importance (to affiliates), and it were a retail-oriented web

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Parasite Alert: LinksAdor / GimmeBargains Adware

Both affiliates and merchants should be aware of this contextual adware application which is already acting as an affiliate in multiple affiliate programs. Here’s a screenshot of their information from Commission Junction (taken off their today’s application into an affiliate program): Why should you be concerned? Well, they are not

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Affiliate Payments: Preferred Methods and Frequency

From the most recent AffStat Report we know that the top three affiliate-preferred payment methods are: Direct deposit (62.1%), Check (17%) and PayPal (17%). Here the full pie chart: Now, what about payment frequency? How often do affiliates prefer to receive their payments? I started this poll, and so far

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Is Twitter a Better Marketing Tool than Social Networks?

Earlier this Spring a study by Arbitron and Edison Research revealed that close to half of Americans (48%, to be exact) have profiles on social networks, which actually is exactly double the level from two years ago [more here]. However, a more recent research conducted and published by the same

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Recruit Affiliates with Intelligence & Link Building Tools

Have you noticed how Compete.com is positioning itself now? Here’s a screenshot I’ve just taken (emphasis, of course, mine): This is, actually, not too surprising to see. What is surprising thought is that competitive intelligence and link building tools have taken so long to start selling themselves as powerful affiliate

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Do Affiliates Want Relationship, Communication, or Neither?

A few days ago, I published a brief article based on the data retrieved from both Econsultancy’s U.S. and U.K. 2009 Affiliate Census reports, and from the newest Affiliate Summit’s 2010 AffStat Report. The article was entitled: Communication with Affiliates: Methods and Frequency, and appeared at Econsultancy.com. I think everyone

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Affiliate Marketing: Pros, Cons and Other Considerations

I’ve just finished reading an interesting article in the UK’s Marketing Magazine where they look at affiliate marketing, giving their take on the pros and cons, as well as quoting some interesting statistics. You may read the full article here (it’s got some good tips for merchants new to affiliate

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Mobile Affiliate Marketing Best Practice Guidelines

Yesterday (on April 27, 2010) the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has published version 5.0 of its “U.S. Consumer Best Practices (CBP) Guidelines for Cross-Carrier Mobile Content Services” [more here]. This fairly voluminous document (139 pages long; full text in PDF here) prescribes industry standards for mobile messaging (SMS and MMS),

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