Its that time of year where we give thanks here in the US, so it’s a great opportunity to let you all know how thankful we are for helping us get to where we are today.

This year, your partnership helped us become the 9th fastest growing Company in the US, according to Inc Magazine, and you helped us earn the #1 spot on the mthink Bluebook Top 20 Performance marketing networks. You also helped us articulate a new direction of the performance marketing landscape by participating in our community blog and podcasts. Thousands of you are followers of our Twitter and Facebook profiles, and your feedback, input and comments have helped shape our platform and industry into an innovative and robust community of driven and resourceful individuals.

As a way of thanking you, we have been working diligently to bring you new features to make performance marketing with MediaTrust easier and more efficient. Here are a few things we have been working on:

* We’re refactoring our entire code base to make the platform faster and more efficient
* We’ve added hybrid tracking (cookie-based and cookie-less) to ensure conversions are correctly attributed to the referring publisher
* We’ve enhanced our fraud detection tools to minimize fraudulent activity, enabling us to maintain the highest payouts from our advertisers
* We’ve added a compliance center to our website (http://mediatrust.com/compliance.html) to aggregate key information for our advertisers and publishers

As always, our goal is to provide you with a rich community and the most innovative tools to make your performance marketing activities even more ‘bountiful’. Feel free to contact us with comments, suggestions and ideas so we can make next year even better.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Peter Bordes and the MediaTrust Team

Your participation in the fight against the advertising tax is needed. There is great strength in numbers.

Our effectiveness in fighting legislation that directly harms the income of affiliates will ultimately be bolstered by readiness. Reaching out to legislators prior to the proposal of advertising tax bills in January will give us a much greater success. Legislators care about their constituents, and we want to be armed with real life examples of the devastating impact these laws will have on the people they represent. Even if the advertising tax has not formally been introduced in your state, please take a few moments to complete a form on the Performance Marketing Alliance site and join other affiliate marketers in the crucial fight against this legislation!

You can register your support HERE.

Having worked in the performance marketing field for the past 9 years as both a creative designer and a creative director has prepared me with the know how to hit the ground running.

With that in mind, my first mission on the job was – you guessed it – to take a poorly converting campaign and make it shine.
The key is to recognize what works and what don’t work and to apply your changes in a timely fashion. Here are a few tried and true tips for creating high converting landing pages.

1. Do Your Research
Find out what your visitors are looking for and what offers work within their demographic. Make a profile of your ideal customers and keep them in mind when building the page.

2. Match Your Ad Creative
Your landing page and advertisement creative should match. Use the same headline from your ad to let visitors know they are in the right place.

3. Keep it Simple
The quickest way to lose a visitor is to give them an over-worded, over-designed page. Don’t over complicate things. Help the user scan through what you are offering quickly and easily. Use small blocks of copy and bullet points.

4. Use Multiple Calls to Action
Make it easy for your visitor to convert. Place several call to actions above the fold as well as below the fold. Some people click the first link they see while others read the entire page before taking action.

5. Check Your Work
Be sure your forms are properly passing leads and there are no flaws in page functionality. There is nothing worse than losing a qualified customer because of sloppy work.

6. Split Test
Always have a few versions of your offer to drive traffic to. Sometimes the simple short landing page is effective. Other times the longer review ad copy landing pages work better. It’s all about finding what works better. Don’t be lazy! Do your testing.

Managing your customers and giving them exactly what they need is the fast way to higher conversions. The main thing to remember is to try different things and always test them.

This week we’re taking a look at Facebook’s new policy prohibiting any form of promotional campaign without their written approval. What does this do to Facebook’s usefulness?

We’re also diving in to the current state of mobile with 2ergo’s Director of Marketing, Lindsay Woodworth. What are the barriers to entry? What industries are utilizing mobile couponing? Watch this week’s RS and find out!

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Headline: Consumer spending: Settling in on spending less

Details: A recent report from SpendingPulse (a service of MasterCard Advisors) speaks to the fact that they dont see an aggressive move upwards in consumer spending. They point to s slight increase for the holidays, then back to a stabilized level in Q1. There were some highlights, particularly how much of consumer spending goes to health care (~70%!). This means that Health and Personal care spending should continue during this time period, so make sure you have a good campaign from this category in your portfolio of offers! Full article HERE. Some tidbits below.

“Consumers have entered a period of stabilization,” said Kamalesh Rao, director of Economic Research for MasterCard Advisors. “We are not seeing robust measures of acceleration.”

With consumer spending – including such items as health care – accounting for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, economists watch it closely. Any change in retail sales could indicate what kind of economic recovery the nation will face.

During this installment of our MTU video series we’re bringing you a presentation from Dush Ramachandran of Clickbank. Dush gave this presentation this summer at Affilicon Israel. This is great introduction to the world of digital products.

Last Tuesday, one of our founders, Jivan Manhas gave a keynote at a performance marketing leadership summit hosted by OfferVault – you can see the slide deck at the bottom of this post. The coverage of the event on Adotas is here. A couple things came up at the event that folks in the industry unanimously feel need addressing by the industry:

1. First and foremost is the issue of reducing the types of fraud perpetrated by publishers that cost the advertiser money and hurt their brand. The solutions discussed were both private sector (OfferVault seeks to create a publisher certification service called AffiliCert) and public sector based (The PMA will presumably step in here to take a leadership role in defining standards and best practices for publishers and networks)
2. The second issue is policing the networks and internet for advertisers that seek to dupe the consumer by poor disclosure or fine print that hides the truth about what the user is signing up for and how their data will be used. These types of shady promotions are what Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is so focused on rooting off of facebook’s and myspace. Recent updates to the “Scamville” issue can be seen here.

So what does all this mean to you?:

1. Regulation from both state and federal levels is coming our way, so stay away from dodgy advertisers, questionable campaigns or non-compliant practices
2. More self-regulation is coming: private and public sectors will soon come to market with publisher certification programs and  better standards will be put in  place to make sure the consumer is protected.
3. An industry shake appears to be imminent. There will be the networks and platforms that choose to self-regulate and abide by standards in one corner, and those that are more aggressive, more greedy and less compliant will be in the other corner. Can you guess where the money will go??

We would enjoy hearing your thoughts on these issues, so chime in below!

Since I got such a great response to my Banner Design post, I thought I would basically do the same thing for Email Design. I’m going to look at what makes a successful Email Design.

Pixel Size
Set your width to about 500-600 pixels. Most recipients will be looking at your email through their “preview pane” which is usually a small portion of their available screen. One of the most popular email clients is Microsoft Office’s Outlook. It’s preview pane is adjustable, but usually defaults to somewhere in between 400 and 500 pixels wide!

Speed
Basic advertising and marketing research has told us that we don’t have a lot of time to communicate the message of our ads. Your customer could only glance at your ad for 2 seconds! That’s why the content of your email needs to have hierarchy and the copy needs to be designed so that it’s easily scan-able. Since the customer’s preview pane is so small, they will only see the top half of the email. So make sure the main message is above the fold!

Branding
I’ve seen a lot of email campaigns with artwork that is totally different than it’s landing page. I would advise against this practice. The email and landing page should look related. They should use the same messages, colors, logos, and images. If the customer ends up on a landing page that looks different than the email creative, they will get confused and think they are in the wrong place and most likely abandon your campaign’s funnel.

CSS
Forget using CSS. Coding for emails is difficult. There are so many scenarios. You will encounter more scenarios than you do with your web design work. Your email design could be viewed in a number of different combinations of browsers, clients and operating systems. I know it will limit what you can do with the design, but in my experience, you can save yourself a lot of time trying to fix CSS in all these scenarios, by just using HTML with no CSS. Actually, I think you will be surprised what you can learn and accomplish by limiting yourself to only HTML! If you must use CSS, use embedded CSS instead, and make sure it’s below the tag. Any CSS that you place inside the tags will be lost. So don’t try to link to CSS files hosted on your server.

Testing
Make sure you send a test email to a variety of email clients and services. An email can display very differently in each scenario, so it is very important to check if it looks alright, no matter how complex your design/code is.

Subject Lines
You need to write compelling subject lines. The first thing people will see is the subject line. Then they decide if they want to open your email. Sometimes the subject line is not interesting enough, and they don’t even open the email! If they don’t open the email, they won’t click on the ad. If they don’t click on the ad, they lose opportunity to purchase a product or take any type of action you wish them to take. So grab there attention by using a phrase or words that resonate with your customer.

Key Benefits List
Use a point form list to communicate to the customer the key benefits of the product or service. This is a quick way for the customer to consume the content of your email’s message or proposition. It is a very popular element and is widely used in many email designs.

Call to Action
Just like in banner design and landing page design, you need to have a strong call to action. Usually ones that clearly tell the customer what they’re going to get have the most impact. Ex. “Download your FREE kit now!”… rather than just “Start Today!” If you place a strong call to action on a tangible button shape, you got a winning combination!

Flash
It doesn’t work in emails. Don’t waste your time trying to figure it out. There is no flash player for Outlook. Also, Javascript, ActiveX, Movie Clips, etc., they don’t work either. If you need something like this, put a link to a web page with the video on it.

Unsubscribe
You need a link to a page where the user can opt-out. This link needs to be visible and can go anywhere in the email. I would recommend placing it at the bottom (So they look at your ad first, just in case they’re interested!). Also a physical address has to be present, in case they want to send the opt-out request by regular mail. The CAN-SPAM laws, require that a physical street address is included in every commercial email.

Fresh off the road from ad:tech New York, we’re armed with a dozen or so great interviews that we shot from the exhibit hall floor. The first piece we want to show you is an interview with Mike Stocker, CEO of Kenzei. Mike talks about the current state of email marketing as well as the unique way that Kenzei prices their offerings.

Don’t forget to check out the next installment of our MTU Video Webinar series. It’s a presentation that Dush Ramachandran of Clickbank gave at Affilicon in Israel this summer. If you’ve ever been curious about digital products or just want to learn more about Clickbank, you’ll want to check this out. It goes live on our blog on Monday, November 16th.

Download or watch using Quicktime: iPod | Hi-Definition

Subscribe (FREE) to the show in iTunes: iPod | Hi-Definition

Like what you see? Sign up to be an affiliate!

Headline: MediaTrust Compliance Center provides latest info for industry participants

Details: On the new site, we put together some recent articles which will help you research best practices and processes for performance campaigns. With more emphasis put on industry regulation and compliance, our updated compliance center will help publishers steer clear of unacceptable practices and learn about more compliant standards. Our Center is complete with the latest industry and legislative information and MediaTrust’s codes of conduct for search, display, email and social media distribution. Check it out today.