Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Moments and Milestones from Affiliate Summit East

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Affiliate Summit RockstarsAnother Affiliate Summit has wrapped up and as usual my suitcase is full of swag and my head is full of ideas. LinkedIn requests have been sent, Gmail is back down to Inbox Zero, and it is finally time to sit back and actually take everything in.

Each trip brings with it so many moments and milestones for me both personally and professionally. Some are about profit and others are just plain fun.

In no particular order, here are some of my favorites from Affiliate Summit East 2013 in Philadelphia.

  • Trying to use crutches while carrying bags and wearing dress shoes. I’m a failure. I gave up and just increased the ibuprofen/steroid cocktail. But it was worth it to walk up the Rocky Steps.
  • Having both Wil Reynolds and Scott Jangro mention my Venture Beat article in their presentations made me feel more like a Rock Star than even my crazy ShareASale party outfit.
  • Speaking of Wil, I really, really loved this–“Is your site the best answer or the best monetized?” I’ll be thinking about that and looking through all of my sites a LOT in the next several weeks.
  • I’m not sure I am a Philly Cheese steak kind of girl, but I gave it a shot.
  • Brian Littleton is one of the most fantastic people in our industry. Not only was he nice enough to jump in and solve a problem for me in a big way, but he is so smart and insightful that he was able to speak off the top of his head about a topic I prepared months for!
  • No matter how well you schedule, there will never be enough time to talk to everyone you want to talk to and do everything you want to do.
  • Aweber branded running socks are awesome.
  • Talking about how you make more money than other people will ALWAYS be a jerk move. You won’t make people jealous. You’ll make them not like you. That’s a whole post for another day.
  • Hand sanitizer probably doesn’t help when you hug everyone you see.
  • You can attend just about any session and come away with at least one tip you should be trying. I learned about contests, brand management, SEO, and what time of day I should be working the hardest. Totally random but all useful!
  • Just because someone is your “competition” doesn’t mean that you can’t be friends and maybe even be able to help each other.
  • Ben Franklin.
  • Ask other people what they are up to. Murray Newlands is the king of doing that. It never fails every time I see him he asks what I am doing lately and if there is anything he can help with. When you take an interest in others, they will take an interest in you.
  • Build on your connections quickly. Don’t stash away all of those business cards you received. By the end of next week, make sure to have followed up in some way with everyone you can–LinkedIn, Twitter, email, it doesn’t matter.
  • Good friends aren’t afraid to tell you when you are being grumpy and need to snap out of it (Thanks, Eric). Conference days are long and it is easy to get worn out!

Lastly, and most importantly:

  • Start planning for next time. I asked Shawn Collins when he will start the hard core planning for Affiliate Summit West. He said “tomorrow.” In a way, we all need to be doing that. Where do you want your business to be before you go back and see all of these people again? What do you want to have launched or relaunched in the meantime? How do you want to take what you learned at East and implement it before West? Now is the best time to start planning for tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who made the show a success for me. If I started naming names, I know I would leave people out. But you know who you are. 🙂 What were your Moments and Milestones from the conference?

Learn About My $135,000 Sale at ASE13

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Affiliate FraudI love speaking at Affiliate Summit. I know it’s weird, but I enjoy putting together presentations about what I know, what I have experienced, and how others can learn from my mistakes.

Next week at Affiliate Summit East in Philadelphia I will be speaking on a panel. I already had my presentation put together when I came across a transaction in my Commission Junction reports that would be the best news I could ask for. A sale for $135,000 with a commission of $6,790. For most solo affiliates that sale would be over a month of work for them and a cause for celebration. For me, it was just a perfect example for my presentation: Fighting Affiliate Fraud from All Angles.

Although fraud isn’t exactly a fun topic, it’s a necessary one in our industry. As an affiliate, I feel it is my obligation to be on the lookout for fraud and work with my merchants when I see it. In the especially egregious example above, it was clear to me as soon as I saw the transaction on my rewards site that it was fraudulent. I used clues like how long the person had been a member, the lack of other transactions in their account before making one this big, the items they supposedly bought, etc. Sure–there might have been a 1% chance the sale was legitimate, but I would rather play it safe than sorry with my merchants.

Whether you are an affiliate, merchant, or network, we have some great tips for how you can both prevent fraud as well as take care of it quickly when it occurs. We’ll talk about everything from incentive sites to monitoring your brand. We have real-life examples that we will share with you and show you how we dealt with them. Plus, we’re leaving plenty of time for Q&A at the end to help you deal with your own problems.

We all stand to lose when fraud happens, so we all need to work together to try to prevent it.

Here’s the information you need if you want to attend:

Session Title: Fighting Affiliate Fraud From All Angles
Day: Monday 19th, 2013
Time: 11:30am-12:30pm

Learn how merchants, CPA networks and affiliates can all work to minimize fraudulent transactions and keep programs profitable. Examples, data and tips from a range of programs and niches.

Experience level: Intermediate
Target audience: Merchant/Advertiser
Niche/vertical: Fraud

Tricia Meyer, Owner, Sunshine Rewards (Twitter @sunshinetricia) (Moderator)
Michael Esposito, Affiliate Manager, Costume SuperCenter (Twitter @mjesposito13)
Samantha Murphy, Co-Founder and CEO, Marathon Ads, LLC (Twitter @MarathonAds)

(This Session is Open to Networking Plus, VIP, and All Access Pass Holders Only)

Below is a video interview that my fellow panelist, Mike Esposito, did with Todd Farmer that gives a little bit more information about his part of the presentation.

[youtube1]nzsZGqcUWq8[/youtube1]

Why Affiliate Marketers Should DIRTFT

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When I was a kid, my dad had a shirt from work that I will never forget. It was plain blue with the letters “DIRTFT” on the front in blue. Simple but profound. We joked that it was his “Dirt Foot” shirt. But it was really a motto that they had at PPG, “Do It Right The First Time.” It always stuck with me both in my work and my private life.

It’s easier to do something fast than to do it right, but many times that will come back to bite you. When I get an idea, I want to execute it immediately. Sometimes that means cutting corners. But in the end, I know that I am better doing it right the first time.

I’ve come across this so many times in my affiliate marketing business and figured I would share them with you so that you don’t make some of the same mistakes that I did.

  • Use Templates and CSS. Often when you are building a site you just want to jump in and get it going. When I launched Sunshine Rewards it was on a template system with CSS but to save time I often just hard coded things like URLs, fonts, and colors. My programmer hated it. Fast forward 7 years and we are now white labeling the site. Every place that I hard coded versus using the template or CSS now has to be changed. This can also come into play when you are using a WordPress Theme and have to upgrade it.
  • Build Affiliate Links Properly. On SR we use a link database. One some of my blogs I use Pretty Links. But in a lot of places I have just dumped in raw affiliate links because I was trying to get a post up quickly. With the closure of the Google Affiliate Network, I have had to change every single link for affected merchants. On SR and where I used Pretty Links to redirect, it is a snap. But in all of the places that I just dropped a quick affiliate link? It’s nearly impossible. It would take me so much time to go into every post that it wouldn’t be worth the time. Will I lose revenue? Absolutely. So now I have to pick and choose where I will lose the most and where it isn’t worth it to spend the time changing the links. Not a good use of time.
  • Use SubIds or Different Network Accounts. Most affiliate networks will allow you to use your links on multiple sites. That makes it easy to apply for a program once and then just use those links across different sites. But what happens when you want to try to figure out revenue for a particular merchant just for one of your sites? Or if you want to sell a site? If you know you won’t be selling sites, at least use the SubIDs available within each network so that you can easily see which sites your revenue is coming from. If you think there is a chance you might ever sell your sites, you may want to have separate network accounts when possible.
  • Anticipate replication. When I first started working with CPA Networks, we coded our site to be able to do postbacks from just them. Once we started working with a couple more Networks, we completely changed our system to be able to quickly add new networks without redoing a lot of work. Now we can add postbacks for most networks that use the most common platforms (CAKE, Directtrack, etc) in less than an hour.
  • Set up folders and use naming conventions. I have so many images and files on my computer and often I know that I want something from the past but just can’t put my finger on it. It may be a stock photo that I bought years ago and never renamed or a video saved in a random folder. Do yourself a favor and rename images so that you can find them later, set up folders to organize different projects or sites, and don’t just save everything in default places with default names because it’s faster. You’ll regret it later!

There are so many areas in my business where I am either glad that I took the time to do something right the first time or regret that I did not. Do you have any examples of either from yours?

    Surprises in Affiliate Marketing

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    Surprises in Affiliate MarketingI went away for a two week vacation and came back to find some really interesting things in my inbox and in the networks. I think that the closure of the Google Affiliate Network has really shaken some things up in terms of merchants and affiliate networks (and in a good way). Most of the surprises were good ones! It’s going to make Affiliate Summit in Philadelphia fun because we have just a little bit of time between now and then to watch how everything plays out and then be able to gossip about it.

    Here are a few of the things that made me go “hmmmmmm” this week:

    • Hilton all of a sudden popped up in Commission Junction. Up until now, we have had to rely on the Converseon tracking and the program has been HORRIBLE! In fact, we haven’t been paid since about August. Andrew Kardon promised some exciting new things now that he is cleaning up the program, and this is a good indication that they are serious about making the program better.
    • Pandora opened a program on Linkshare. I had been under the impression for years that they were never going to have an affiliate program because of their “brand concerns.” They have always been really picky even with their resellers. Combining this program with the Chamilia program could result in some cool new datafeed sites.
    • Oriental Trading Company announced that they are leaving GAN for Impact Radius. This is a HUGE win for Impact Radius. It actually poses some problems for ME because Oriental Trading Company is a big merchant for me and, honestly, we have not taken the time to integrate fully with Impact Radius yet because they just didn’t have any exclusive merchants that we really needed to integrate with. This is going to change that for us for sure.
    • Gymboree opened a program on ShareASale. I think this is a big win for ShareASale. My mom site visitors have been asking for Gymboree for years. I had come to doubt that we would see a program from them. This one started converted for me pretty much as soon as I posted it!
    • Joe Sousa is moving to Florida to join the Fanatics Affiliate Management team. I can’t say this is a HUGE surprise because I knew he was interviewing, but it was interesting nonetheless. I’ve known Joe a long time and think he is going to be a fantastic addition to the team. He has sports knowledge, affiliate program management experience, and an open mind when it comes to the Steelers. (Well, 2 out of 3 isn’t bad)
    • In the negative news department, a lot of GAN merchants still have not announced where they are going. For those of us who are solo or who have small staffs, we aren’t going to be able to change out hundreds of merchant links in just a month. Even though GAN is supposed to continue tracking for awhile, many of the notices we are getting are only giving us a week or so before the merchants completely close down their GAN program. This is definitely going to cause some chaos in July (and otherwise relatively slow month for affiliate marketers).
    • Also in the “bad surprise” category is news on the Performance Marketing Association’s Facebook page today that Ohio has introduced Affiliate Tax legislation and it is moving quickly. If you are an Ohio affiliate, you need to get the word out about this and get to work. I had not previously seen Ohio on any of the “watch lists” by the PMA and the fact that it happened so fast is scary for all of us.

    So what else have I missed besides the normal affiliate marketing buzz? I used to think that June was a slow month for affiliate marketing, but not this year!

    Edited: So right after I published this, I got a knock at the door from FedEx. My biggest affiliate marketing surprise this week was apparently that I was a winner in the ShareASale Spring Fling contest! Check it out! Thank you, ShareASale. 🙂

    Shareasale Spring Fling Winner

    The Recommendation Project

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    Tricia Meyer RecommendationI really dislike asking for recommendations. Part of it is that I struggle to do recommendations myself, and I know that other people feel the same way. Part of it is that I don’t want people to feel like they have to do it even if they are too busy or just really don’t have anything good to say about me (although I hope the latter isn’t true!). The final part is that I don’t like “quid pro quo” recommendations where you only refer someone because they referred you back. I don’t think you get honest recommendations that way because people feel forced.

    On the flip side, I know that I seek out recommendations about people before I work with them–sometimes even before I respond to their emails. It may be something simple like someone wanting to interview me for a story. More importantly, it might be a potential consulting opportunity. It may even be a merchant trying to decide if I am worthy of working with. I want to know them and they want to know me. They may ask me for referrals, but more likely they will just start Googling away to see what they can find.

    I’m confident of what people will find about me online because I talk about myself an awful lot. But I know they don’t want to just hear what I have to say. They want to hear what merchants and networks and former employers and affiliate colleagues and consulting clients want to say. I know I need recommendations.

    I decided that rather than put anyone on the spot, I would just start a Recommendation Project. I’m putting this out there to my whole network. If you are so inclined to help me out, I’m making it easy.

    • You can leave a recommendation directly on my LinkedIn profile and I’ll direct people there.
    • You can leave a comment on this blog post and I will copy it over to my new Recommendation page.
    • You can click on this form and fill out the short fields to tell me who you are and what you have to say.
    • You can email me and I will copy the email.

    I’ll take all of the feedback that I can get and compile it on my brand new Tricia Meyer Recommendation page. It’s lonely and sad looking right now. But I have no doubt that it will get better soon.

    Thanks in advance to anyone who does decide to recommend me in any way. I know that putting yourself out there publicly in support of someone else is not to be taken lightly. I appreciate that you are willing to take the time for me!!