Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Affiliate Marketing 2013 Naughty and Nice List

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A couple of years ago right before Christmas wrote about Naughty Merchants [That] Deserve Lumps of Coal and in 2012 I did a full Affiliate Marketing Year in Review. This year I decided to combine the 2 with a year-end Naughty and Nice list. If you want to see who I think is naughty and nice throughout the year, be sure to follow me on Twitter because it seems to be what I tweet about the most!

The Naughty List

Google

Although I’m probably risking having my sites totally de-indexed for even saying this, Google tops my Naughty List this year due to their handling of the Google Affiliate Network shut down. When they announced in April that they would be closed by the end of July, they left not just affiliates but a lot of OPMs and merchants in the lurch. Almost immediately our reps were gone and there was no one around to ask questions to. Programs didn’t launch on new networks until the very last minute (and some at all).

Cellars Wine Club

Sometimes merchants accidentally screw over affiliates. Sometimes they do it intentionally and claim it was accidental. I’m not sure which was the case with Cellars Wine Club on Thanksgiving and continuing through to Cyber Monday, but you can read all about it in Eric Nagel’s post. This was a case of major changes being made to a site and the affiliate program commission structure during a holiday and peak shopping period. More importantly, all of their changes this year (getting rid of half of their products, changing their site, the coupon code issue, etc) have been done without any notice to affiliates outside of what gets generated from the network automatically. [Read more…]

Why My Business Will Not Be Open Thanksgiving

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As Black Friday approaches, I am seeing more and more advertising materials. Between the customer facing ads I get myself (via email and my mailbox) and the newsletters I am getting from the merchants I promote, it’s obvious that everyone is ready to start making that anticipated holiday money. But at what cost?

When I was younger I would get up early with my mom and go Black Friday shopping. That was officially the start of holiday shopping season. More recently, companies started running their “Black Friday” deals online on Thursday. (I’ll admit that I sometimes check those out while watching football.)

Now I am hearing more about brick and mortar stores that are actually starting their holiday deals on Thursday…Thanksgiving…in the morning! And I am sure that there are plenty of cash back and deal sites who will be running big fun things on Thanksgiving to try to capitalize.

I will not be one of them. Sunshine Rewards will not be one of them.

My company will be closed on Thanksgiving. Just like it was last year. In fact, we even let our customers know in advance that we will not be working on that day and that they can reach us again starting Friday morning. We’ve sent out emails in the past saying that we will be closed so that our employees could spend time with their families. Not a single customer has ever complained.

Why am I so adamant that we will not be open on Thanksgiving even though I know that we could probably make more money if we were? Quite a few reasons.

First, I’m busy on Thanksgiving. Plain and simple I have a lot to do! Between turkey baking and wine drinking and football games, time is of a premium on Thanksgiving.

Second, Thanksgiving is a family day. For pretty much the entire rest of the year I am on a laptop, tablet, or phone working. Whether I am in my office or my family room or even the school pickup line, I am always working off and on. Thanksgiving is one of the only days of the year where we are all together without work or school or dance class or Zumba or any other noise. If there were ever a time to truly focus on spending time as a family without any distractions except for food and football, it’s Thanksgiving.

Lastly, everyone deserves a break. My customers deserve a break from endless streams of sales emails in their inboxes. I deserve a break from the computer. Affiliate managers deserve a break from hearing from me. If we all agree to take a break on the same day, it can work out. When others don’t follow our lead, it creates expectations that we should all continue to be online because others are.

You could make the argument that I will still make money on Thanksgiving because people can technically still shop through my site. That’s true. But it is a fraction of what I would make if I were out pushing deals that day. I could even automate my Daily Deal newsletter to go out that day, but I won’t. I don’t want people looking for the email. I want them doing whatever it is they like to do on Thanksgiving. If that includes online shopping, they can feel free to visit my site. I just won’t be on it.

Will you be working on Thanksgiving? Is it too good a marketing opportunity to miss?

Are You Throwing Away Your Affiliate Money?

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Losing affiliate moneyAs an affiliate that promotes everything from clothes to surveys to video streaming, I see a lot of different offers and business models. Once upon a time I was happy to take $1 per sign up for an offer even if it meant sending my traffic away to a competitor. It was revenue! And I didn’t know any better.

Last week at ShareASale ThinkTank I had a number of conversations with bloggers about why they should not promote toolbars that will steal their commissions. Little did I know the big surprise I would receive from a merchant this morning.

SavingStar is a great way to save money using digital grocery coupons. I use them myself. I promote them to my members. I guess I should say “promoted.”

I received an email as a SavingStar affiliate announcing happily their new cash back shopping and toolbar. I’m sure that it is very exciting for them because it will bring in huge revenue for them. As an affiliate, huge warning bells went off in my head. Here are a few lines from the email that worried me most:

  • We also have a toolbar which makes it seamless and easy to save all the time you see a deal.
  • Through SavingStar’s Cashback Mall, you can save every time you shop at sites like Groupon, Travelocity, Proflowers, Macys.com, Sears.com, LandsEnd.com, BestBuy.com, and hundreds of other online stores.
  • Enjoy promoting these amazing offers and I will be updating you more frequently about exclusive coupons, increased cash back and holiday shopping deals.

Unless I am misunderstanding something, SavingStar wants me to encourage my visitors to shop through SavingStar’s affiliate links. Those links include merchants that I myself promote. So if I am encouraging them to shop through SavingStar, I am basically flushing my own affiliate revenue down the toilet.

I may make $2 for convincing someone to sign up with SavingStar, but how much am I losing when I promote a Macy’s deal on my site but my visitors use their handy dandy SavingStar toolbar to get a deal and cash back? Even if the toolbar is not set to pop up when an affiliate link is used, are you willing to take the chance to encourage them to use a cash back site to get your $2 and then just hope that they do not ever use the cash back site?

I have nothing against the cash back business model. I own a cash back site. But I also tell bloggers not to promote cash back or coupon sites if they are going to use affiliate links themselves. If you aren’t going to use any other affiliate links, by all means take the CPA on referring your visitors to other deal sites.

SavingStar is just the most recent merchant-turned-affiliate to pull this. I’m calling them out only because 1) a lot of bloggers will not even catch that email, and 2) many will not understand the significance of the shift from just grocery coupons to online deals. Eric Nagel is working on a post you’ll want to read about some of the other ways you might be valuing short-term over long-term. I’ll link to that as soon as it is up.

Are you a blogger that has been promoting SavingStar? Will you continue to promote them? If you are a merchant or affiliate manager, how do you feel about participating with a “merchant/affiliate” like this?

Good Stock Photos for Only $1

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If you are like me and have bought into the idea that we need to have pretty pictures with our posts to get more attention on social media, you have probably been 1) making a lot of graphics lately, 2) buying a lot of photos, 3) stealing images from other people, or 4) searching all over online for someone to borrow from and give them a link back.

I stay clear of #4 for the most part because I like to alter the images and don’t like giving away backlinks. I’d like to think that we are all above #3, so that leaves #1 and #2. I am terrible at making graphics, so that basically leaves me with buying them.

I had been buying most of my images from iStockphoto, and they do have a lot. Pretty much anything you could possibly want. I don’t mind paying for really nice graphics whenever I need really nice graphics. But most of the time I just need something basic or something that I can doctor up with a little of my own low budget magic. Just something to put an image to the headline.

I had purchased some graphics from GraphicRiver before and was happy with them. I had a few credits in my account there and decided to check there first for an image the other day. I ended up on their sister site, Photodune, where I could also use my credits. I found exactly what I was looking for and only paid $1 for it! Since then, I have been getting everything I need for between $1-3.

One of the best things about it is that I can use my credits across their different properties to buy everything from infographic templates to photos to WordPress templates (including the one we used to create WineClubReviewandRatings.com). I make a quick $20 payment from my PayPal account and can buy graphics for a month. If I don’t need graphics, I can buy music clips for my podcasts, video clips, and even lines of code. Because their marketplaces are all linked, you can find many different shortcuts to make your sites nicer.

Here are a few of the images that I ended up with from the $1 photos I bought. As you can, they are not fancy, but they were great for the articles that I wrote and accomplished my goals. In the first case, I wanted something perfectly sized for the new Facebook image guidelines so that it would like nice in the News Feed. For the second I was more concerned with the thumbnail and Google+

This last one was actually made from a graphic from the GraphicRiver section of their site. The “Birthday Frame” cost me $3 and then I was able to make changes to it easily in Photoshop.

I don’t think that graphics are going to become less important anytime soon with them now being displayed so prominently across social media when people link to our posts. For those of us who are not great with graphics ourselves, we can either spend money on them or spin our wheels trying to create or find them. From now on, I will be spending a dollar or two on something that works versus hours of frustration.

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?