Affiliates please take the time to participate in this fight that threatens our industry and your livelihood. No matter what size your affiliate business is your voice is needed and does make a difference. An advertising tax bill has been proposed in Maryland, and a hearing has been scheduled for March 17th. If this tax passes, we estimate over 100 advertisers will terminate their affiliate programs with Maryland publishers.

The Performance Marketing Association is the central hub of all of our initiatives and is leading our industries charge to fight this unfair and ill-conceived tax.

“Our effectiveness in fighting legislation that directly harms the income of affiliates will depend on your support. The PMA will be coordinating a targeted grassroots campaign, and we need help from all Maryland affiliate marketers.”

You can learn more about this issue here:

http://www.performancemarketingassociation.com/blog/category/state-legislation/maryland/

You can register your support on the PMA site:

http://performancemarketingassociation.com/advocateform.html

You can also join a group formed for Maryland affiliates: http://groups.google.com/group/pma-md/

Our strength is in our numbers!

If you Twitter please use #NoAdTax to help spread the word in your tweets and Tweet this post ASAP
You can also reach out to the PMA

Rebecca Madigan
Executive Director | Performance Marketing Association
o: 805.445.9700 (PST)

The survey is from mThink’s Revenue Performance Magazine. You may remember that we were named #1 Performance Marketing Network in 2009  in RPM’s Blue Book. We’d love to try and repeat that success, but we need your help. Just take a minute to complete this survey and help us toward our goal!

Now, I’m just spit-balling here, but my goal is come back from SXSW with a boatload of information that I can use to help those in the performance marketing industry grow their business. So, if you’re open to sitting down with me for a few minutes to talk, shoot a video for Relevantly Speaking, or just grab beer and brainstorm – I’m in!

Email me at: sparent AT mediatrust DOT com or reach out to me via Twitter @americancliche.

Safe travels to Austin.

First, we’ve developed a new landing page report which allows users to view statistics for each landing page on a given campaign. After sending traffic to multiple landing pages, users can view and compare conversion rates on each and determine which one is performing the best. Using the highest performing landing page will increase commission without the need for any new distribution.

Second, for those users that segment their traffic source with a sub ID, a landing page filter has also been added to the Sub ID Report. As conversion rates can vary for each segment, this feature allows even more in-depth and accurate reporting to help increase commission.

In addition, lead adjustments are now displayed in a new summary at the top of the Sub ID Report. This allows publishers to see things like bonuses, as well as items like chargebacks or items scrubbed for fraud. This is in alignment with our goal of increased transparency.

Finally, all of our reports are now running off a brand new data warehouse, so they should all load statistics noticeably faster.

Hopefully these improvements continue to make your experience a a MediaTrust Publisher smoother and more profitable. Do not hesitate to contact your publisher manager if you have any questions. Still not a publisher? Sign up now!

We had a chance to catch up with Mike Stocker, the mind behind the conversionChat offering MediaTrust Labs just released. He shared some insights with us about the product that help frame up its place in the performance marketing ecosystem.

Q: Why do you feel the conversionChat product is especially relevant in today’s marketing environment?
A: In today’s expensive and challenging online marketing environment, advertisers are looking to get the most from their existing website traffic. ConversionChat allows advertisers to re-engage their site visitors one last time before they exit a site — giving them that opportunity to turn that visitor into a customer or lead submit.

Q: How do you see this product dovetailing with the rest of the Conversion Solutions offerings? With the MediaTrust platform?
A: conversionChat is a natural fit into the current Conversion Solutions lineup of conversion and ROI improving services because it too can be used to increase site conversions and ROI. The goal with MediaTrust Conversion Solutions was to provide a one-stop toolset for advertisers seeking more from their existing traffic. Now advertisers can choose to follow up, re-market, and reengage their visitors via three marketing tools- Email, Phone and Exit Chat. Conversion Solutions truly gives the advertiser a choice of tools, and the site visitors a choice in how they choose to re-interact with the sites they visit.

The Conversion Solutions suite of products is a natural fit on the MediaTrust platform because it provides MediaTrust advertisers with these complementary tools via minimum effort and potential for up to 20% lift on sales. In a marketplace where networks need to differentiate themselves to stand apart from the crowd, MediaTrust has decided to bring great technology tools to help their advertiser partners make more from the traffic they generate via campaigns.

Q: Ultimately, how do you see this product in the marketplace a year from now?
A: conversionChat will continue to mature as we work to meet client needs for the product. I envision it will be even more deeply integrated into the Conversion Solutions suite as it is fully tied in to the Email and Phone based conversion tools to provide the optimal lift in conversion for MediaTrust advertisers. I’m also hopeful that conversionChat will gain more ubiquitous popularity for marketers of all sizes  as they seek to continue to improve on the ability to personalize and customize 1:1 messaging for each consumer. As we all know, this is critical in the coming months and years to provide the most effective marketing to savvy customers. Frankly, someday I’d like to see conversionChat on every commerce or lead-oriented site on the web!

In cooperation with our partners, NASCAR driver Joe Nemechek of NEMCO Motorsports and Global Media Minds, we launched a new website, www.frontrowjoe.com. With this partnership, Joe has wrapped his #87 car with the www.frontrowjoe.com URL to promote the website during the Daytona 500 this weekend. The website has several of our advertisers (QuoteWizard, MagicJack, JupiterJack, Force Factor, AbCircle, Autos.com, FlexBelt and ResumeBucket) listed on it.

In this program, Joe’s car will give new meaning to the concept of driving traffic! When fans go to www.frontrowjoe.com and click on offers, a portion of each lead or sale goes to supporting Joe’s NEMCO motorsports 2010 NASCAR campaign. This convergent marketing program is the first of its kind. We are integrating a traditional offline channel (car sponsorship) with performance marketing, PR, and social media marketing to deliver value to advertisers, drivers (publishers!) and fans (consumers).

We have leveraged PR, twitter, blogging and facebook to begin the awareness generation for the car and www.frontrowjoe.com. Over the next few days, NASCAR fans will be exposed to this innovative program via press, additional social marketing and the NEMCO team’s cars (Joe’s car is #87, and his other car is #97) speeding around the track for time trials and practice races.  However, the real results will come as fans are exposed to the URL over the race weekend. We estimate that 16-17 million people will view the race this year, giving us a lot of impressions for our URL on Joe’s Cars — which should result in more traffic to www.frontrowjoe.com than the road into the Daytona tailgate on Sunday morning.

We are thrilled to bring this type of innovative thinking to our industry. As you may have been reminded earlier this week, MediaTrust is committed to innovating with our technology, business relationships, and campaign execution. This partnership with Joe Nemechek and Global Media Minds is another example of our commitment to bringing fresh thinking to our industry so advertisers and publishers can leverage our pay-for-performance channel to get real results.

To follow the world’s fastest performance marketer this weekend, follow frontrowjoe87 on twitter, visit  Joe’s facebook page or check out his blog.

How did we choose the winner? We tried to make it as fair and simple as possible. First, we compiled the number of entries in list form. Then we used a random number generator to pick a number between the parameters set. We then counted down the list until we hit that entrant. We checked to make sure that he was following us and that he had tweeted the appropriate phrase. Anthony had met both of those criteria.

Anthony, please send an email to sparent AT mediatrust DOT com and provide your mailing address so we can ship your prize. Over the next week or so we’ll be purchasing the Kindle and loading it up with our picks for the Top 10 Marketing Books of 2009!

Congrats on winning and thank you to all those that entered!

We know that this isn’t earth-shattering in terms of technological advances, but it’s another way for us to create a better user experience while you interact with MediaTrust and our content.

Because we just released it, it should be considered Beta and there may be some kinks we’ve yet to find. If you notice any funkiness on your mobile device, please let us know in the comments.

Have a great weekend!

Earlier today we published our picks for the Top 10 Marketing books of 2009. We believe that reading any, or all, of these books will help you to elevate your business to the next level. That said, you can go out and buy them yourself, or you can enter our swanky little contest to win an Amazon Kindle pre-loaded with these books.

You only have to do two things to enter:

1. Make sure you are following us on Twitter.

2. Tweet out the following: Attendance at ASW + @MediaTrust list of Top 10 Marketing books of ‘09 = becoming a better marketer! Details: http://bit.ly/4qIYl1 #ASW10

Because we believe in the value of education in our industry, we want to reward those that are taking the next step to expand their knowledge of Performance Marketing by attending Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. After you follow the instructions above to enter our contest, make sure you stop by the MediaTrust Meet Market Table #34 to drop your business card off for an extra chance to win. To be clear, you don’t have to attend ASW to enter, but it could help your chances.

We’ll be picking a winner on February 1st, so you have until then to enter. Good luck!

UPDATE: We’ve had a few inquiries, so I wanted to be clear that this contest is open to entries worldwide. So get in there and Tweet from far and wide!