Adam Jewell – Search & Affiliate Marketing

The day started bright and early with a 7am flight departure out of Philadelphia that left on time, got to Salt Lake City about 25 minutes early and the connecting flight landed in Santa Barbara right on time. You’d think an affiliate marekting conference in Santa Barbara would be be crawling with early arrivals since the hotel rate is good tonight but so far there don’t seem to be any familiar faces.

The hotel is just about sold out except for some outrageously expensive suites. CJ is still showing registration is available for CJU 2008 which is unusual since it usually sells out as much as two months before the conference kicks off. You’d think the down economy would boost attendance at a performance marketing conference but maybe budget custbacks are keeping people back home at the office.

In any case, it is beautiful Santa Barbara weather, maybe 70 degrees and sun. The beach is right across the street with some kite surfers taking advantage of the sun and wind. As usual there are tons of sailboats out in the harbor, bikes and a number of variations out on the beach and the sidewalks. The hotel is great as always, definitely one of the best places I’ve stayed over the years.

The Stelers are set to take on the Browns tonight starting in a few minutes so I’ll probably go get dinner and maybe a few beers and watch the game. Tomorow should be AWESOME. Since the conference doesn’t start till Tuesday, tomorrow is a free day and I’ll be doing some horse back riding, going to some wineries (which has never been a big thing for me but it sounds like this might be prety cool) and then out on a sailboat. There is supposed to be some Danish villiage that there will be time to go through and misc other sights to see. The tour will be with Captain Jacks Santa Barabara Adventure Tours and the specific tour will be the “Captain Jacks Top Deck Tour” that should provide a pretty good sampling of a nice chunk of the cool stuff to do around here. Since CJU doesn’t really get going till the welcome reception on Tuesday at 6pm, I may line up some other adventure stuff on Tuesday as well, maybe head out the Channel Islands for a little kayaking. Well, it looks like the Steeler game is starting so it’s time to sign off and go watch the game. Tomorrow should be an awesome day.

The economy must be causing a drag on the world of affiliate marketing or maybe just for Commission Junction advertisers and affiliates. Usually the CJU affiliate conference sells out long before this but with exactly one week to go before it kicks off at the Fess Parker in Santa Barbara, CA it looks like there are still open spots. Hotel rooms at the Fess Parker DoubleTree sold out a long time ago so there will definitely be a crowd but it may be smaller than in previous years.

The Fess Parker DoubleTree has been a fantastic venue for the CJU conference over the years and this year is likely to be outstanding as well. It looks like the hotel recently opened an on-site spa which may require a visit while out in Sunny Santa Barbara. They offer massages and facials at what appear to be average spa prices.

Other activities out in sunny Santa Barbara include Segway rides and tours at Segway of Santa Barbara. There are also a variety of tour companies out in Santa Barbara including Captain Jacks of Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara Adventure Company and shops, boat tours and restaraunts along Stearns Warf in Santa Barbara.

Seven more days till CJU! Let the festivities begin and be sure to sign up if you haven’t already!

Commission Junction University 2008 (CJU) is now open for early bird registration! The event will be held at the stunning Fess Parker DoubleTree resort hotel across the from beach in Santa Barbara. Dates of the show are September 16-18, 2008.

CJU is one of the best events in the online industry for the content, the people there (they know their shit – how to sell stuff online, not just how to throw out buzzwords), the food, the location and the atmosphere.

The cost of registration keeps going up every year and is now up to $995.00 which is getting pretty steep, particularly in a year when the economy is on the downturn. I think it was only $595 of $695 a couple years ago the first time I was interested in going.

If you are looking for a GREAT affiliate marketing conference to go to or just an excuse to take a business trip to Santa Barbara, then go signup for CJU today!

So I didnt’ pay to much attention to the exact dates or the agenda for Affiliate Summit West. Affiliate Summit & SMX were cross promoted with discounts to one if you bought a pass to the other. With a speaking gig at SMX on Tuesday, all I had time to do at Affiliate Summit was register, pick up the pass and the SWAG bag, pop into the first networking thing, grab a few free drinks and head out to the airport on Monday morning to SMX.

There were a few familiar faces there, George Yuba – great guy from CJ, a few fellow CJ affiliates, some others I knew from CJU and WebmasterWorld PubCon shows. It would have been nice to be able to hang out for a while longer and see some of the presentations, find out what is new in the world of affiliate marketing but that will probably have to wait till CJU in September 2008 in Santa Barbara.

Maybe next time, they’ll stagger the conferences a little more to facilitate going to both of them. The RIO seemed like a decent place to have such a conference. The place is HUGE, has conference facilities right on site and seemed to have a number of restaurants and lots of casino floor space in the hotel/convention center as well. It might be a better all-in-one package than the Las Vegas convention center down by the Las Vegas Hilton and the Renaissance Las Vegas.

By the time I booked, the RIO wanted about $300/night so ended up staying at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas instead. Maybe if I had been able to go to the whole Affiliate Summit conference it would have been better to stay at the RIO but Planet Hollywood worked out great and was a really nice place to stay.

Since I’d been to Vegas 5 or times in the past and gone on a Grand Canyon tour once but had never been to a show, I decided it was time to make up for lost time and went to four shows – Blue Man Group at the Venetian – KA at the MGM Grand – Crazy Horse Paris at MGM Grand and Zumanity at New York New York. The shows were great and the Las Vegas discount show tickets were cheaper than buying in advance or a the box office!

So the last time I spoke at Search Engine Strategies was in Toronto in 2006, I believe. That panel was on shopping engines (yawn!). Sure, there are some things you can do with shopping engines. You can try all the different ones, spend lots of money on them, pay their ever-increasing cost per click rates and sometimes generate a decent ROI. For the most part, you just send them a feed of your products, enable people to do price comparisons, and generate smaller average order values than other online marketing vehicles tend to generate.

This time around I’ll be on the “Dealing With Affiliates” panel. It seems that maybe affiliates have a bad reputation in the Internet Marketing industry. When the panel is called “Dealing With Affiliates“, it kind of gives it a negative connotation – kind of like dealing with a clogged toilet, not very pleasant.

To some degree, affiliate marketing deserves this negative connotation because of some of the early aggressive tactics used by affiliates over the years. Spyware and cookie stuffing have been problems over the years that gave affiliate marketing a bad name in the past. Affiliates have frequently spammed the search engines so merchants don’t have to do it themselves so that probably makes some affiliates evil in the eyes of Google.

One problem the affiliate industry has is that few people really understand it. In traditional sales and marketing terms, an affiliate is really just a contract sales person who doesn’t get paid anything unless they generate sales. An easy way for the average online marketer to think about affiliate marketing, is that the affiliate does the same thing you do, except they generate sales much more efficiently and at a much lower cost of marketing than the average online marketer. The affiliate has one goal – sales.

Affiliates tend to be small companies or individuals who don’t have to with the organizational issues associated with most organizations. They find what works and do it. They adjust their promotion methods to maximize sales and profits. They don’t get paid for fancy ads or aggressive bidding unless it makes money. Good affiliates may have big egos but they run tight, smart, profitable online marketing efforts.

Most of the issues around search and affiliates are only issues because companies have a lot of things that distract them from making money. They focus on things that really aren’t that important. Is the affiliate out bidding us on “our” keywords? If “our keywords” are anything but the company’s brand terms, the company should be happy that the affiliate is promoting them and not another company.

When it comes to paid search, many companies prohibit affiliates from using their display URL in PPC ads and linking directly to the merchants website. Sometimes there may be good reasons or this. If the merchant has a really, really good internal PPC program, opening up use of the display URL may not be advantageous. Lots of in-house or 3rd party run PPC search programs suck and as such could use some affiliate involvement to make more money and get better coverage. This is always a hot topic and is sure to lead to heated discussions on the panel. It did at CJU 2007 in Santa Barbara and definitely will at SES.

One company sent me an email today about their affiliate program with the headline:

Company XXX Search Marketing Allowed! Please review

Hmmm, I must have joined this program at some point but never did anything with it. I probably never will. Search marketing is allowed with the following restrictions:

Strike One – Affiliates can NEVER under any circumstances use the company display URL in a search ad.

Strike Two – Affiliates must never use company brand names in search copy regardless of the keyword searched. hmmm..is that paid, organic or both?

Strike Three – Affiliates must NOT serve ads that appear in a higher position than our ads. hmmm…so if the affiliate can write search copy and link the ad to their own website, this merchant is going to tell the affiliate to stop bidding on the term or get the (CTR*bid price) down below the ads run b the company.

So they do permit search marketing, but you can’t mention the company you are promoting in “search copy” whatever that means, you can’t link direct from PPC ads and you can’t appear above the merchant in the search results on any keyword.

This is exactly how you encourage any search affiliate to promote the competition if the industry has any opportunities for affiliates. This company either has amazing search programs going, has a lot off ego, or doesn’t put much value in the affiliate channel.

See ya in Chicago for a lively affiliate session!