Internet Marketing Industry Unite! Fight the Internet Advertising Tax

The entire ecosystem of online marketing is being attacked state by state with the rollout of the internet advertising tax that affects affiliates, publishers, merchants, affiliate networks, service providers and more.

The state tax attack started last year in New York: “OverStock Files Lawsuit w/ Supreme Court to Fight New York Tax Law” and has now started to spread rapidly in many other states like CA, CT, FL, MN, IL ( to name a few). This ill conceived tax that has been called unconstitutional my Amazon and other companies fighting it. The tax bill started directly attacking the affiliate marketing industry by creating a nexus, meaning that affiliate programs would be charged state taxes for transactions generated and treated as if they were physical store fronts.

Instead of creating more revenue, it has done the opposite as internet retailers in these states have been shutting down their programs. In New York State over 100 programs were shut down affecting approximately 3,400 affiliate marketers. The Tax is now threatening to rapidly spread to other states and cause the same negative effect hurting many affiliates and small businesses. One of the key issues is that state legislators do not understand the ecosystem of affiliate marketing and how this current tax structure causes a much larger negative ripple effect across the entire industry.

There is no way for people outside the industry to get a clear picture or understanding of the tax’s impact because there is little data or rese about affiliate marketing’s intricate complexity. this led to the recent formation of the Performance Marketing Alliance and the Affiliate Voice Association.

It is very important that our community understand the reach and gravity of this tax as it can literally wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in industry revenue and even affect shareholder value of public internet media & marketing companies. In it’s current form it does more harm than good, and in fact, appears to create less tax revenue and instead sucks more income out of our already ailing economy. It is hard to get a clear picture as there has not been any total impact study done by state or federal government.

THESE STATE TAXES MUST BE STOPPED NOW

There is an industry-wide call to action. The entire online marketing community is coming together to fight the internet advertising tax at state and federal levels. It is very important that we all participate in this ground swell and collaborate before it’s too late. No matter who you are, you can make a difference by letting your voice be heard in your state.hThe affiliate marketing segment can help make the most impact as states are very concerned about not hurting small businesses. On an aggregate basis the affiliate marketing channel is estimated to be $10 billion in revenue.

The Performance Marketing Alliance is now at the center of a grass roots movement working on behalf of the affiliate marketing industry. The PMA has real-time information and tools you can use in each s tate to make a difference such as individual and group form letters, legislators information and more.

This coalition is being coordinated by Google’s state policy counsel, and includes ActOnline, Amazon, AOL, Comcast, DLA Piper, eBay, Microsoft, TechAmerica, and Yahoo. The intent is to pool resources and intelligence from all these companies’ lobbying efforts, to make sure we all have up-to-date information, and the most effective coverage.  Sometimes house reps need to be targeted, sometimes Senators, other times it is certain committee members, and their guidance will help us direct our efforts.

Make sure to follow the PMA and also push this information out into your community through your blogs, Twitter, Facebook forums etc. We will be posting coverage and sending targeted messaging to our MediaTrust partners who are in the states that are in need of affiliate letters, calls and meetings with local legislators. When Twittering information out make sure to use #advertisingtax

Here is a list of resources to follow and people who are actively working together to fight and make a difference

PMA Performance Marketing Alliance Association Blog :: Twitter :: Facebook

Affiliate Voice Association Site :: Twitter

NY Affiliate Voice :: Blog

5 Star Affiliate programs blog

Revenews Blog

Affiliate Tip Blog :: Twitter

missyward.com Blog :: Twitter

Jangro.com Blog :: Twitter

lisapicarille.com Blog :: Twitter

stephanielichtenstein.com Blog :: Twitter

Fight Against the #AdvertisingTax :: Facebook Group

Over the last few weeks you can’t turn on a TV, read the Washington Post or even browse Twitter without hearing about the controversial little acai berry. Is it the real deal or is it all hype? I think the answer is not so black and white. First off, this is a hot new health product. People are buying all sorts of products that claim to help with weight loss and overall health. Now, research shows that their ARE proven health benefits of acai including destroying some type of cancer cells.  However, we’ve all seen the misleading sites that promise that consuming this berry, in some form, will be sole answer to all your weight loss problems. Gimme a break.

First off, let’s be clear – the only way you loose weight is if you expend more calories than you consume. That is usually accomplished through a combination of diet and exercise. Can we, as intelligent people, agree on that? That said, there are things that can aid in this process. One of our advertisers on the Advaliant Platform, Ultragreen Products, makes products that we believe to be the real deal. 

Since I’m just a snarky blogger, I thought I’d quote an actual scientist. Dr. Rene Reed, a member of the Ultragreen Products research team, says:

 ”Simply put, the Acai Berry is a superior anti-oxidant that helps to protect cells against damage from free-radicals. When someone is losing weight, fat oxidizes, releasing free-radicals that can severely damage the body. To maintain good health, anyone losing weight should ensure they are getting good quality anti-oxidants as part of their weight management program.”

Ultragreen has also released a video that outlines more of their research.

Do you have to believe what we’re saying just because I showed you a quote and a video from a company that sells acai products? Of course not. You have to be a responsible adult, have some accountability for your actions and do some research. Only then can you decide if you think that acai products will work for you.

I can tell you that as far as science, integrity and trust goes, Ultragreen Products are the real deal. If you’re a publisher on our platform, you can continue to market this product with the piece of mind and confidence that it doesn’t fall into the same bucket as some of the misleading products we’ve all been hearing about. If you have any questions, please email me directly at sparentATmediatrustDOTcom and I will be sure pass them on and get you some answers.

With the current economic situation, more budget is moving online, and more budget is being allocated toward performance marketing. So what does that mean for marketers getting into the space for the first time?

First off, lets make sure we are clear on WHAT performance marketing is. Simply stated, performance marketing allows an advertiser to pay for results. If you’re a marketer looking for qualified traffic, leads, or customers, you’ll only pay for the results you seek.

In considering performance marketing for the first time, there are a few high level items to think about prior to getting your toes wet in the space. Its important to consider these items ahead of time to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign and minimize your brand risk.

1. 1. Work with someone you trust. The relationship you have with your platform and the platform’s reputation in the market is key to building high performance campaigns that deliver on your expectations. Work with people you trust and you will be able to have the kind of dialogue that builds brand while delivering bottom line results.
2. Work with a platform that has a vetted publisher base. The quality and integrity of the publishers on a platform will be reflected in the quality of your results. I cannot stress how important it is to have a group of publishers that you and your platform trust. Remember, in performance marketing, the platform you work with only gets paid when you, the marketer gets the results you seek—so the good ones will have the better publishers.
3. Work with someone who can help you with your creative, campaign “packaging”, and landing page optimization. These elements make the difference between success and failure in performance marketing. If you work with the right people, you can trust them to deliver the goods in a way that complies with your brand and delivers the results you seek. A campaign can always improve. The days of fire and forget are long gone. Work with someone who will help you evolve things to improve your results.
4. Educate yourself on the differences of performance pricing versus traditional impression pricing. Performance marketing is a direct response medium so your message and call to action has to reflect that reality in your creative. Today, there are no points for impressions–only the use of these traditional display-based media to effect a transaction of some sort. Its a good idea to understand these differences before embarking on a campaign, so call someone knows the space to help educate you. If the folks you call don’t have time to bring you up to speed, chances are you dont want to have a long-term relationship with them. (Feel free to call our head of Sales, Peter Ettenborough (978-819-4129), or any of our senior sales people: Julian Mossanen: (647-259-4946), Chantelle White: (917-675-6104), Mike Carney (647-259-4948), or Andy Hawkes (978-771-7800). They would be glad to help educate you and see how we can help!

Should you have any questions, feel free to contact me or any of the folks listed above. As an industry, we look forward to serving your needs! I can be reached at 917 512 1693.

Many affiliates have wondered if search engine marketing will continue to grow or if search has become an exhausted, time-consuming, risky way to promote an advertiser. Today at SES:NY I sat in on the Orion Panel “The state of search: maturing marketing place or poised for more growth,” which consisted of search engine professionals. Many agreed that there are many areas of search that have potential to grow and develop, however it all depends on how innovative we can be as marketers. They referred to a heavy reliance on traditional media and other forms of offline advertising to drive people back to search. The panel stressed how important it was for internet marketers to look towards television advertising to find trends to use in keywords. And the road splits two ways. Television can also use search as an advertising experiment to see how their message resonates online before launching. Advertisers can look to search as an immediate online survey for their brand or service and give them the proper direction to lead with. With a hurting economy, advertisers and affiliates are getting smarter and going beyond conversion to maximize their ROI. The search audience is also becoming more sophisticated and they are using better keywords. The panel emphasized how there are pools of new words to bid on that have never been touched and that Google is now working on making these categories more accessible. Their panel left the audience very hopeful that the SEM industry was not going anywhere; in fact it’s always evolving.

Speaking of innovation, I also got a chance to check out the Facebook workshop on “Harnessing the social graph.” Many affiliates have taken advantage of advertising on Facebook and have come away with a quick profit. So how do they do it? Here are some tips on how to best optimize your affiliate campaign in order to drive high conversions.

1. Creative Best Practices – Most Facebook users are engaged with what’s going on in the space, so it’s imperative to make your creatives stand out.

2. Writing a Relevant Ad – Make sure your ad copy matches your audience and objective.
3. Creating multiple ads – It’s important to understand what ad formula works for you, so try testing your creatives and change one variable.

4. Refreshing Your Creative – Building brand awareness generates demand over time so make sure your audience is seeing something new every time they login.

5. Metrics for Optimization – Analyze your results. What has the highest CTR?

Connecting the two panels together, I sat in on “Dealing with affiliates: a roadmap to success” to end my second day at SES. What I took from this discussion and I cannot stress it enough, is the importance of open communication, especially in the affiliate marketing space. I think paid search and affiliates marinate well together and if the right specs are shared, the possibilities are endless.

My last night in Austin at SXSW we found ourselves at Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar. Cheezy? You bet, but we were winding down our night and our group of friends wanted to spend our last bit of time together having a beer and singing along to 80’s music. As the duo on stage played songs, they would offer to take requests for money. At one point they were asked to play Bohemian Rhapsody. They declined, saying it was too difficult to sing for the money offered. They also offered to extend their set or make up funny songs if people continued to come to the stage and fill their tip jars.

At one point I looked over at Christopher Smith and said “THIS is affiliate marketing.” It was a perfect example of performance-based pricing. You deliver the goods, you get paid. Think of the piano players as the affiliate. The songs they performed are the acquired lead and the audience as the advertiser. As I looked around at the friends I was with, it became really easy to explain to them, using this example, how performance marketing worked. They all started to nod and get it. 

The reality is that we see elements of performance-based marketing everyday. Even in the most unlikely of places – a sweaty bar in Austin Texas – affiliate marketing was alive and well.

For the record, the duo was only offered $4 to play Bohemian Rhapsody. They passed, deciding it wasn’t nearly enough payout to deliver that particular lead.

SXSW: A forum to look into the future of our industry

We recently co-sponsored a survey of affiliates with eConsultancy, a UK based research shop. Aside form the usual branding benefits that go along with such an endeavor, we believe this type of activity is key to maintain a dialog with publishers of all sizes and shapes to reveal trends, technologies and best practices that help shape the way the performance marketing channel is evolving. SXSW is a great forum for such dialog and we hope that you enjoy Scott’s coverage of the event.

To take a page out of the Beastie Boys book, I “sample my own track” and quote something below that I wrote to preamble the research:

Performance marketing is evolving rapidly and the input and feedback of the publisher-base is critical to the success of the ecosystem that exists among marketers, publishers and end users. As the performance marketing model implies, we all benefit only when all members of our ecosystem are satisfied. This means that an ongoing dialogue is necessary among all parties in this ecosystem and important to our collective evolution as an industry…As an industry, we collectively seek to provide more value to (these constituents) so that our relationships with them grow stronger and more lucrative. Our hope is that with a continued dialogue among affiliate publishers of all sizes, collectively, we will be able to deliver a higher quality service to the brands we serve today and the ones we look to serve in the future.

The tools, technologies and ‘memes’ that saturate the South by Southwest event are critical to our movemenet forward as an industry. The capturing and sharing of the up and coming online behaviors and tools will help us better serve the publishers, advertisers, and customers within our industry ecosystem. We look forward to what we will learn, and we hope you do to! Feel free to submit any trends or thoughts you may have on where things are going so that we can report back to you!

MediaTrust and Econsultancy teamed up to publish the first U.S. affiliate census today. Some of the key findings include:

* 17% of affiliates are generating at least $600,000 per year in revenue for merchants.

* PPC makes up 48% of the affiliate category

* Health, sport and fitness makes up 41% of the total promotion of affiliates.

MediaTrust’s Chief Marketing Officer Trip Foster says:

“Performance marketing is evolving rapidly and the input and
feedback of the publisher-base is critical to the success of the
ecosystem that exists among marketers, publishers and end users.

“As the performance marketing model implies, we all benefit only when all members of our ecosystem are satisfied. This means that an ongoing dialogue is necessary among all parties in this ecosystem and important to our collective evolution as an industry.”

You see get the full report at Econsultancy’s website.

A few weeks ago we asked our publishers to take a few minutes and take Econsultancy’s 2009 Affiliate Marketing Survey. We had a great response! To thank our publishers, we’ve made it available (for a short period) exclusively on our Advaliant Platform. All you need to do is login and view your dashboard, or get the link HERE.

There is a lot of very useful information that will help you further succeed in all of your performance marketing endeavors. To those that are NOT Advaliant Publishers, fear not, we’ll be making it available to everyone on March 10th. If you’d like to access it before then, you can join Advaliant and get immediate access.

Most of you have indubitably played the field, some have found the perfect match, some have chewed their arm off. Finding the perfect match in life is hard because you don’t know if your choice is going to continue to be the beauty queen that everyone hypes her to be or she’s going to be the one that leaves creepy messages for you saying Call me, Call me. Affiliate Marketing is like that, sometimes it’s exciting, other times it’s Mrs. Chucky time.

In the Day to day world of an Affiliate publisher it’s very similar to being at closing time on a Saturday night – who should I commit all of my charm and resources to? Sometimes that choice becomes more difficult because your friends are giving you the nudge, nudge and hyping the beauty across the room. Trust me on this one, look past that one a little further before making your decision. Be a playa’, enjoy life a bit more.

If you’re going to run an Acai offer – you have to at least once in your life – find out what else is available and then date them all. A little speed dating action if you will. Shortly you will see which one is your Mrs. Chucky and which one will make you brag to your friends. Just the other day I saw a clear example where a publisher followed the hype, jumped in with both feet with an offer – while throwing little at a comparable offer. They made LESS by running the hyped offer. Don’t let this happen to you. Ask for the full roster in each offer category and then do a little speed dating. The one that performs the best in a head to head competition is the one that you should marry your traffic to.

Don’t be blinded by the highest payout, do a little speed dating, try different channels, check your head the head EPC’s and laugh all the way to the alter – and bank.

Have you saved something to eat it later and before the time passes you cannot resist the urge to take it? Well, an interesting study I found explains why. Apparently, there are two areas of our brain that compete with every decision: the emotional and logical parts.

“Researchers at four universities found two areas of the brain that appear to compete for control over behavior when a person attempts to balance near-term rewards with long-term goals. The research involved imaging people’s brains as they made choices between small but immediate rewards or larger awards that they would receive later. The study grew out of the emerging discipline of neuro economics, which investigates the mental processes that drive economic decision making. “

In a more recent article, researchers link delayed gratification with intelligence.

However, what does this have to do with SEO or PPC? A lot.

I was trying to research why after so many years, we still prefer PPC over SEO.

Browsing through blogs and forums where you can learn about affiliate marketing and promoting CPA offers I noticed that the vast majority of the advice is to focus on Adwords and Pay Per Click. I was hoping this would change with the years, but since 2002 (when I started as an affiliate) it has always been the same.

I agree PPC is probably the easiest way to get started on affiliate marketing. It is quick and “easy” and SEO is hard and takes time to see results, but once that SEO work pays off, your rewards are huge.

I’m not here to propose that you stop your PPC campaigns and focus on SEO. No … I run PPC campaigns too, but I do want to tell you why you should use a mixed approach that incorporates SEO too.

Promoting an offer using paid search has many benefits:

1. You can see immediate results.

2. You can test many different things: ads, landing pages, search positions, etc.

3. You can do geographical targeting.

4. You can track conversions easily.

Nevertheless, focusing on PPC exclusively has a major drawback … can you guess what it is?

“Anyone” can do it.

Most PPC “gurus” don’t talk about this, but the reality is that most offers you can promote have a “window” of opportunity. A time frame when you can make the most money. It is the time where the demand is high and most of your competitors haven’t caught up to it.

Once everybody starts using spy tools and bidding for the same keywords, what do you think happens to the bid prices? They rise obviously!

That is one of the reasons why you have to be constantly looking for new hot offers to promote.

Now, let me give you an alternative route.

Let’s say that you try to focus on offers around similar themes like: business opportunities, dating, etc. You then try to create content sites that provide content for those niches and promote the offers in the content.

You start by sending PPC traffic to those sites, but after you figure out what works, you start shifting part of your PPC budget to content development and promotion. It is very surprising how cheap you can get quality content and promotion these days.

If you spend $1000 a month on PPC, spend  only $900 and invest the rest in content that attracts links. If you have a larger budget you might want to consider hiring a blogger that writes the content and promotes it using social media. Make sure the content and the links are well optimized for SEO and the site pages are getting indexed.

In a few days you will start getting free clicks from the search engines, clicks that you don’t need to pay for.

In a few months, your extra search engine clicks will give you an edge that will be very hard for your PPC competitors to reach.

I try to do this for every successful campaign I run, and that is why I love SEO. The return on investment is way too big to ignore.

How many of you incorporate SEO in your search marketing efforts?

You don’t do SEO … really?? why not?