Performics has upgraded ConnectCommerce, their affiliate marketing technology platform, on the last day of July 2006 to include Template tracking. The feature will help improve productivity for Performics’ affiliates and advance the overall usability of ConnectCommerce. Links now work instantly because they don’t have to propagrate to the servers. The new link structure includes publisher’s ID and a unique advertiser template. Additionally, promotional emails from Performics and advertisers now contain ready-to-use links.

An Affiliate Summit 2006 session from Dave Taylor titled Blogging Best Practices: Maximizing Your Success is available to watch on video. The presentation is available for free on Google Video. If you are on dial-up or low bandwidth connection, read the transcription.

Shawn Collins pointed out an article in the Wall Sreet Journal Online (no subscription required for 7 days only) written by David Kesmodel. The article, The Lifeblood of Online Porn, summarizes the current state of affiliate marketing, specifically in the porn industry.

Adult space is hyper competitive yet very lucrative in term of commission. Jupiter Research, a New York-based technology-research firm, estimates that adult content on the Web may generate only about $250 million a year in U.S. revenue. On the other hand, Adult Video News estimates the figure at $2.5 billion.

A seven-employee company, for example, took in about $1.4 million in revenue last year, and have set a new target of $1.8 million in revenue this year.

It was said that porn sellers have policies officially prohibiting things like
spamming, but enforcement is difficult. Spamming related to adult materials will continue to attract the unscrupulous because the response rate to adult-themed content according to the latest study was still the highest of all.

Thoughts: You may not like to involve in promoting adult business, either as affiliate or affiliate manager, but still this industry is one of the best example of where the other niche industries are heading to. Well, more or less.

In a fierce competition to recruit affiliates, merchants or advertisers are forced to creatively offer value to their affiliates, other than merely per sale or action based commission.

Gifts and bonuses are very common nowadays in adult industry, as well as other more competitive niches I know of.

I can see no reason you cannot use this tactic to steal super affiliates from your competitors.

Overall, this article is a good read.

Link: The Lifeblood of Online Porn.
Via: AffiliateTip.com.

SBI users should be excited of this feature. I can’t keep myself from blogging about it. The new brainstormer, which is part of the SBI package, now uses the collective wisdom of the entire Web and SBI to bring results back to you. The tool, which is just launched, is The Ultimate Verticalizer.

What does it do? The Ultimate Verticalizer looks across more than 60 million unique keywords in the SBI! database. SiteSell can have so much keyword because they saved all the keywords from the brainstorming sessions done by their customers.

Additionally, they have their own robot now, called appropriately SBIder, which claims to crawl billions of pages.

The results are that when you search for keywords in your Site Concept Keyword, the tool will return a large list of keywords otherwise not available with conventional tools.

If you want more information regarding this all-in-one website building and promotion tool, visit SiteSell.

• DMA has released bes practices for online advertising networks and affiliate marketing. It is not what you think. The document is only one page, with 5 points online marketers using advertisng and affilaite networks should pay attention to.

• Shawn Collins has received a Linkshare Golden Link award this past weekend for Performance Marketing’s Most Vocal Advocate. Congratulations!
• Paid Content reports that Google Health Portal is now being considered. The search company is planning a product, Google Health Scrapbook, that will overhaul the way patients, doctors, vendors and pharmaceutical companies manage their medical information online. For niche marketer, just a hint on how large the health niche really is.
• AbestWeb forum has a thread started that says Brian Caldwell from CJ has announced at Summit that there will be no end to legacy links. There is no official announcement yet.

The new study results from a 2006 survey by PartnerCentric shows that affiliates didn’t always go for bigger commissions. Other more important factors for merchants to consider include more content and availability of datafeeds and coupons.

For those who assume banners have met their graves, think again. Banners are the second most popular way affiliate publishers use to promote merchants’ programs, just a little below text links (18.80 and 19.88 percent, respectively).

Content, search engine optimization, email, pay-per-click, coupons, datafeed, advertising, newsletter/ blog, website links and incentives follow. Some methods overlap with others, but these data give us ideas on how the affiliate industry was dominated by focused niche content.

The study also shows that niche/ content site is still the main source of affiliate commission income for publishers. Coupon/ discount shopping site and PPC advertisers follow on the second and third spots.

On the 10th rank is blog/ ezine, which probably shows that blogging slowly becomes a way publishers use to drive traffic and earn income in the form of affiliate commission. I doubt the accuracy of this though, because on this spot, blog shares the same rank with ezine.

This comes to my surprise because even a research company still think blog is tightly related to ezine or electronic newsletter. For me, I would be confused to choose a blog or a content/ niche site because I use a blog software to create lots of content sites.

Source: MarketingSherpa.