Make Money with Affiliate Programs

AdMob has announced that they have hit a major milestone by serving 20 billion mobile ads, more than any other mobile ad company worldwide.

The graph below displays their growth. They have noted that the slight depression in February 2008 is due to the shortened month.

AdMob’s 20 billionth ad impression was from financial services conglomerate HDFC. The ad was served in India at 1:56am GMT on Tuesday, March 25, while a visitor was browsing Cricinfo’s mobile web site on a Nokia N70.

Some other information AdMob shared in their announcement:

• AdMob has an ad fill rate of 95% worldwide.
• AdMob has 40% market reach of U.S. Consumers with mobile browsing capabilities = 36 million folks.
• Over 3900 mobile websites use the AdMob platform.

More information on AdMob at http://www.admob.com.

Gary Vaynerchuk, star of Wine Library TV and Director of Operations at Wine Library in Springfield, NJ, will keynote Affiliate Summit 2009 West.

Based on the success of his Wine Library TV show, he’s been featured on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and Nightline.

Gary’s love affair with wine began at a young age when he started reading Robert Parker and Wine Advocate and blossomed over the years as he traveled around the world to various wine-producing regions (his wife remains blissfully unaware of this affair).

But it troubled Gary to observe the stuffiness of the industry-conceited sommeliers, snobby shopkeepers unwilling (or unable) to educate their consumers, and seemingly mystical conventions all combine to make wine seem intimidating to the uninitiated. Wine Library TV seeks to change all that.

Aimed at anyone interested in truly learning about wine, from beginners to experts, young (above 21 of course) to old, Gary and the WLTV community embrace the notion that wine can be enjoyed by all.

In each episode, Gary tastes wines on the fly-it is unrehearsed, unscripted, and off-the-cuff. As Gary likes to say, he shoots from the hip, but always from the heart.

Affiliate Summit 2009 West is taking place January 11-13, 2009 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

I was optimistic when Eliot Spitzer was ousted from being Governor of New York that his plan to collect taxes for all Internet transactions by residents of New York would fizzle.

But it looks like his scandal plagued successor, David Paterson, wants to move forward with the proposal to require out-of-state companies to charge New York state and local sales taxes, which is not currently required by companies without a physical New York presence.

The New York Post reports that this move would raise an estimated $47 million for the state, according to projections from Spitzer’s plan.

However, it’s certainly not a done deal.

Critics and even some supporters expect legal challenges, citing a 1992 US Supreme Court ruling they say prohibits a state from forcing a company with no physical presence in a state from collecting the state’s sales tax.

Lawmakers and aides to Paterson and the legislative leaders yesterday were still trying to hammer out final details of the new spending plan, which is due by 11:59 p.m. tomorrow but will likely be a day or two late.

Anyhow, how does this impact affiliate marketers?

Well, the initial reasoning or excuse for the change was that having affiliates of an out of state company who live in New York would constitute a physical presence.

So maybe companies decide not to take on NY affiliates if the are a liability in this fashion?

That would be a shame, but it could be a reality to avoid having those taxes added, which would make it less attractive to transact with businesses like Amazon.com for the consumers.

Q: I recently got the Link Capture to help recruit affiliates, but I can’t figure out how to use it. I know how to do a search on the software, but I don’t know how to find affiliates that make sense for me.

A: I am sure there a lot of different ways you could use it, but I’ll tell you how I’ve used it.

Basically, what I would do is to make a search query for the top keywords in the niche of the affiliate program I was managing, and then export those query results into Excel or a .csv file.

The exported data includes the postal mailing address for the prospective affiliates and I would take that and send out a direct mail piece.

This would generally be a postcard that includes the value propositions of that affiliate program.

I would then follow up the postcard with a telephone call or email, information which is also included in the export.

Don’t just email the affiliates without any prior contact - do something different to get attention for your affiliate program.

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The Google AdSense blog has shared a couple of guideline reminders when optimizing your AdSense placements.

1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

This brings us back to recent revival of talks about affiliate link disclosure, which I discussed with Sam Harrelson on the latest episode of the Affiliate Thing.

Sam also sat down earlier this week with Ted Murphy of Izea (formerly PayPerPost) to chat about the disclosure issue. Listen to their chat on GeekCast.fm.

More details at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-look-at-optimizations.html.

LinkShare Flex Links are being used in a neat way by Beatport, a digital music store with DJ-quality club music, who is enabling affiliates to put music their sites.

The Denver-based company has developed a widget that’s embedded with via LinkShare’s Flex Link technology.

Affiliates can post the widgets on their website, blog, and social network profiles. The widget can hold up to 100 tracks from Beatport’s library of independent labels.

Check out a live example of the widget at HousePlanet.DJ.

Download audio file (Safari%2020080325%202116.mp3)

Sam Harrelson has started up a new series via audio and video to chronicle how he is creating a new affiliate site, SciFiTales.

The site is a blog where Sam will go over how he creates content, drives traffic, chooses ads, lays out the page, etc.

If you’re just getting into affiliate marketing, be sure to follow Sam’s progress. He starts out with his process for creating a monetization plan for the site.

Affiliate Summit is five years old, and I have searched around my various external hard drives and computers for the pictures I’ve got from each of the past nine events.

There are all now up on the Affiliate Summit account on Flickr.

The second Affiliate Summit, June 2004 on a cruise from New York City to Halifax, Nova Scotia

• Affiliate Summit 2003
• Affiliate Summit 2004
• Affiliate Summit 2005
• Affiliate Summit 2006 West
• Affiliate Summit 2006 East
• Affiliate Summit 2007 West
• Affiliate Summit 2007 East
• Affiliate Summit 2007 London
• Affiliate Summit 2008 West

Check out all of the photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/affsum.

Q: I want to embed video on my site without it having any logo or bug in the bottom, right area of the screen. I also have a problem when I paste the code for four videos on a page where the videos don’t all show all the time.

A: As far as the different companies that enable you to host and embed video on your site at no cost, they want their logo on the player as a small ad for their service. I think that is reasonable when you are not paying for the hosting or player.

I do know of one company that offers free hosting and there is a workaround, so that you can use their player without a logo appearing, but that amounts to theft in my opinion, so I am not going to share the name and way to do it.

Two vendors I would suggest are Fliqz and Magnify.net. There are others out there, but these are the two that I’ve used and I’ve been happy with them.

Each one has a setup fee and then a charge for the monthly hosting, and you get a player that’s not branded.

Magnify.net is also is neat resource for creating a community around various video niches.

And then for your other question about videos not showing up… you mentioned you use Yahoo SiteBuilder. That might be part of the issue, since some of those tools monkey around with the code when you paste HTML.

If possible, I would suggest two things: switch over to a blog to power your site and try only posting one video per page and see if that works out.

If so, then test different variables to see if two, three or four videos will consistently appear.

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The March 26, 2008 episode of Affiliate Thing features guest co-host Sam Harrelson, since Lisa Picarille was under the weather.

Sam and Shawn were joined by Will Martin-Gill, senior manager of Internet marketing for eBay, to discuss eBay migrating their affiliate program from Commission Junction to in-house.

Also, they cover a new CAN-SPAM ruling, death of Facebook, Sam’s reality show of building an affiliate site, and affiliate link disclosure.

Show Links

• How the Affiliate Spammers Beat the FTC
• eBay Leaving Commission Junction
• Sam Harrelson’s SciFiTales.com
• Affiliate Link Disclosure

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Stream the show on WebmasterRadio.fm or download.