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Last year I was lucky enough to participate in a panel at Affiliate Summit West with two industry veterans, Kristin Kinsey (affiliate manager and owner of MadHatter Consulting) and Carolyn Tang Kmet (now the affiliate manager for Groupon), and moderated by Marty Fahncke. Our presentation was entitled Start Monetizing Your Blog Today and is a great primer for new affiliate marketers. A few things have changed (Carolyn got married!) but the basics of the presentation are still solid.
Carolyn started the presentation with an introduction about the basics of affiliate marketing, who the players are, and how it all works. I then discussed ways that bloggers can use affiliate marketing including banner and text links. Kristin finished up by explaining the role of affiliate managers and Outsourced Program Managers (OPMs).
Areas Covered
- Affiliate Marketing 101
- Stakeholders
- Evaluating Merchants
- Types of Creative
- The Affiliate Site
- Extreme Site Makeover
- Resources
- Contact Info
Below you will find both the PowerPoint (via Slideshare) and the actual video of the presentation thanks to Affiliate Summit.
[youtube1]8-_YvAiGEoc[/youtube1]
I wanted to comment on the pay-per-click aspect of affiliate marketing. On the one hand, you want to sign up with an advertiser with a little name recognition (e.g., Amazon) that you can take advantage of. But, on the other hand, those big advertisers forbid you from bidding on terms closely associated with their brands. Besides, those advertisers usually already have a presence in pay-per-click, and they’re probably bidding higher than you are for certain generic terms that are relevant.
So – and it’s just my opinion – using pay-per-click in affiliate marketing is not a very profitable venture.
You have here a very quality stuff. I feel I got to the right place, the video and the slideshow, very interesting.
Awesome. Thanks for the great feedback!
I’m lucky enough to live in Orlando, and be friends with Missy Ward, so I just need to commit to start attending our monthly affiliate meetups. I went to one but have been slacking….
You are very fortunate because that is one of the most active local meetups! Definitely a great place to start. If you are interested in guesting on some podcasts as well, head over to geekcast.fm. I can think of at least 4 or 5 of the podcasts on there that take guests. Might be a good segue into some panels or presentations. We take guests over at bloggingabcs.com, too.
Great suggestions, Tricia. A podcast would be fun. I’ll have to check those recos out.
Tricia,
How would you recommend someone to go about getting involved in speaking opportunities like this? Just search out events and e-mail the event organizers?
For Affiliate Summit, they take applications a few months before each event and then have voting on them. Some of the other big conferences like Blog World and PubCon (I think) also have application processes on their sites.
You might want to start with the local Affiliate Summit meetups because they are always looking for speakers for those. Then also check all of the other related groups on meetup.com. I’ve seen SEO, WordPress, Social Media, etc. groups listed on there that are likely looking for speakers as well.
I’ve found that since I started posting videos of my speaking gigs, I’ve started getting more people coming to me directly asking me to speak.