72 Kilowatts Internet Marketing

Hot Charity, or why your favorite coupon site is losing money.

[Source of this info, and a great read for anyone who understands how the mechanics of visitor tracking works:  Abestweb on LinkShare, Rakuten, and OneCause.]

Apart from being a great Rocket from the Crypt offering, Hot Charity seems to be par for the course at Rakuten these days.  Rakuten, for anyone that ambles by here and doesn’t know, is the the parent company of LinkShare, a major affiliate marketing network.

At issue here is the means by which charitable funds are collected, and not the charities they are delivered to.  We all know that charity is a good thing, when administered properly, so in no way should this post be viewed as a sign that I don’t support the idea of charity, or the charities that this Rakuten subsidiary represents.

At issue more specifically is OneCause.  OneCause offers a toolbar for you, the consumer, to download and install on your PC.  The toolbar sits up near the top of your screen when you have Firefox or Internet Explorer open, and then reminds you when you are shopping that the merchant is willing to donate to a charity if you make a purchase.  You then click a little button, you go back to OneCause’s home page, and then you are re-directed back to the merchant to complete your purchase.

On some levels, this isn’t really an issue, and you might think that it doesn’t affect you at the end of the day, as a consumer.

It get’s complicated when you consider the means by which this collection takes place.  OneCause uses a marketing channel known as the affiliate marketing channel to track these purchases (the tracking is actually done by LinkShare, another Rakuten company).  The original idea behind this channel was to allow pay for performance advertising for merchants and affiliated sites.  An example of an affiliate would be some of those coupon sites, or product review sites, you all like to visit.  In order for those coupon sites to stay profitable, they count on commissions paid to them as affiliates by the merchants they refer you to, or give you a coupon for.

However, if you’re then clicking on that toolbar from OneCause in order to make your donation, guess where that commission goes?  You guessed it:  OneCause, who then give a percentage to charity.

So the coupon site, or product review site, or your favorite blogger, or WHOEVER loses out.

So what’s the solution?

Simple:  Get the charity based companies out of the affiliate channel and into their own channel.

Until this happens, small valuable websites will be run under by these toolbar monsters, and larger sites that you use everyday will be a bit more cash strapped as well.

And it does affect you, the consumer.  While OneCause at least donates a percentage to charity, there are other toolbar monsters out there that keep it all for themselves.  Imagine!  So by charging the merchant a commission to make a purchase you were going to make anyways, they are adding a layer of cost that YOU will end up paying for.

Great E-Mail Marketing Permission Reminder post by Ben at MailChimp

I make no secrets about being in love with MailChimp.  I believe they are a step above their competition

when it comes to technology and ethics.

That said, Ben at MailChimp put together this EXCELLENT piece on writing your permission reminders for your email subscribers.

Instead of writing, “You’re receiving this email because you’re a customer” try something more like, “You’re receiving this email because you’re a customer who opted-in for emails when you purchased something from our online store.” Or, “You’re receiving this email because you signed up for email specials while making a purchase at one of our stores.”

I have to admit I haven’t always written the best permission reminders, but with the coaching in Ben’s piece, I suspect I will get better at it.  And since I’m a firm believer that sending emails to people that don’t want them is a bad business practice, not to mention a waste of time and resources, it’s clear that your permission reminder should in fact be personal, communicative, and specific.

They wanted your email, right?  (Right???  I sure hope so.)  So feel free to engage them in all parts of your email.  Not just the sales copy…  The permission reminder is just another way to do that, as well as covering your… you know.

Tags: email, mailchimp, opt in, permission reminders

Converting PMS Color to HTML Ready Colors

I was pulling my hair out trying to match PMS or Pantone colors to Hex or RGB (HTML Notation) until I found this excellent web page:

Zeald.Com Resources:  Convert Pantone Colours to RGB

That got bookmarked right quick.  Thanks Zeald for providing that great resource for web designers.

(As a side note, I know Photoshop can accomplish this, but I use Gimp and haven’t figured it out there yet.  I also know that this form of color matching is not an exact science, so to speak.)

Tags: pantone, pms color, web design

How weak is the affiliate/merchant contract?

Mel at NYAffiliateVoice.com asked me to clarify why I say that the “tenuousness” of the affiliate merchant contract is one of the reasons I broadened my horizons, and stepped outside of affiliate marketing as being my main source of income… Here’s my thinking, for better or worse….

The way I view the affiliate contract is two fold. While on one hand it provides affiliates an easy out in dumping merchants they for whatever reason choose not to do business with, it also provides the merchant the same luxury. And fair is fair I suppose.

At the same time, if we look at the reasons merchants often dump affiliates, it’s for reasons outside of the affiliates control. Those can include:

Lack of sales. This isn’t horrible as it’s not immediately revenue impacting for the affiliate. Though they could have many hours of content and link building invested, so it stings nonetheless.

Too many repeat Customers. This one tends to get hidden a bit, and not necessarily listed as the termination reason. But we all know it happens. In this case, the affiliate is being punished for what arguably is a lack of proper customer retention on the merchant’s part. Some discussion has been given to paying lower commissions on repeat business, and that might not be a bad idea. It’s certainly better than terminating affiliates.

Out Ranking the Merchant in the Search Engine Results Pages. Horrifying. We’ve seen this mentioned at Abestweb before. This can be a big revenue impact for the affiliate, as they may well be getting more traffic than the merchant in some key searches. Why punish the affiliate for having some serious SEO skills, or at worst, some seriously good Google Luck?

Breaking Unwritten Terms of Service. If a merchant is unclear, or doesn’t indicate at all, what their trademark policy (or any other term of service, for that matter), you can’t blame the affiliate for breaking them. But many merchants do, and unjust terminations follow.

Not understanding the NY Amazon Tax. I’m not going to say too much about this one here. But as a merchant, if you’re not COMPLETELY familiar with this legislation, it’s implications, and its workarounds, read more on my blog. Please.

It should be noted that a small merchant could be hurt by losing a strong affiliate just as badly, but I would submit that a valuable merchant partner SHOULD already have a strong enough web presence that losing some key affiliates wouldn’t shatter their total revenue stream. (It certainly can impact market share though, if a major affiliate leaves you for a competitor).

So it can hurt both ways. There are more small affiliates that are affected daily by this, however, so I stand by my belief that it’s a worse situation for affiliates.

Also of note is the fact that an affiliate’s contract with a network is just as fragile. I think history, however, bears out that MOST network terminations of affiliates are well justified, so I don’t see this as being as big of an issue.

So what can be done about it? I’d like to start compiling a list of items affiliates would like added to their contracts with merchants. While I wouldn’t want to see a contract that makes affiliate marketing too much of a “job” in the reporting sense, I would like to see some certainty, especially between merchants and affiliates that have strong histories together.

Don’t forget, Affiliate managers and OPM’s come and go. What works for you today may well not work for you tommorow. It’s time to get more than a handshake.

PLEASE comment below.

Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing networks, amazon tax, merchant responsibility

Affiliate Programs and the New York Amazon Tax

Since I’m not doing anywhere near as much work on the New York Amazon Tax these days, I wanted to provide links to a few sources where you can still get up to date information.

NYAffiliateVoice.com has some wonderful stories and information, including with yours truly published this weekend:  Kevin, NY Affiliate.

5 Star Affiliate Blogs.  Linda continues to do a great job in covering this issue.

The New York Affiliate Forum at Abestweb.com is another great resource that tends to have very up to date info on what programs are and aren’t allowing NY affiliates in, with the proper autographs.

Keep up the good fight, folks.

As a side note, I see Wikipedia updated their Affiliate Marketing page to include a note about the sales tax vulnerability.

Tags: amazon tax, new york state internet and pay for performance tax

NY Affiliates Still Being Eschewed.

Add to the list both BassProShops and Cabela’s.  BassPro has retail locations in New York, so I was surprised at this one.  Must be that they have a separate entity set up for their web presence to avoid collecting NYS tax.

Still though, the legislation would seem to indicate that they are liable fro NYS sales tax unless they didn’t hit the threshold for NY resident affiliate sales.

Interesting stuff.

Tags: affiliate marketing, amazon tax

Some updates on me….

So, I’ve been pretty quiet (ok… very quiet), since I gracefully bowed out of affiliate marketing and took a full time position as an internet marketing manager for a local company.

So while I don’t have too much to say anymore about the Amazon tax fiasco, it looks like that MAY be moving in the right direction.  I continue to wish all my fellow New York affiliates success in their bid to get that piece of unfortunate legislation overturned.

Going forward, I’m going to be blogging about, in general terms, trends and other interesting tidbits I bump into as I delve into Google Analytics, Google AdWords and e-mail Marketing.  Obviously, it won’t be very specific, as I’m an honest guy, and my employers take good care of me, so I’ll take good care of them.

I will however share any info I think can be of benefit to affiliates, and merchants.

Internet marketing is still changing very quickly.  There’s decisions to be made on the value of social media for specific industries, metrics to be developed on the true ROI of a Google AdWords campaign as it relates to lead development for long sales cycle products, and overall strategies to consider in this less than stellar economy.

So that’s me in a nut shell as of right now.  I hope that handful of you that looked up Amazon tax information here in the past will continue to find my postings useful.  There will be some science here, but a lot of opinion.  And those of you that have had the dubious pleasure of meeting me will know that I excel in that area.

Tags: E Mail Marketing, Google AdWords, Google Analytics