Join your Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare and their guest Wade Tonkin of GTO Management as they discuss BlogWorld Expo and the benefits of going plus the benefits of promoting their affiliate progam.

Find us on Twitter:
Wade Tonkin
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney ( a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare talk to Karen Varecka, Client Services Manager at buy.at, about SEO, SEM and PPC marketing. What are the basic differences and how to utilize SEM in your site traffic plan.

Questions we discuss are:
What is the difference between SEM, SEO and PPC
What are the pros and cons to SEO and PPC advertising
What are the major search engines and the second tier and how can you use them all.

**Yahoo search could be entirely powered by Bing as early as September

How to use 2nd tier search engines – less competition, lower conversions, but lower costs.

Miva –> used to be FindWhat
Searchfeed -> now takes you to Miva
Dogpile
Kanoodle
7search
Pageseeker
Metacrawler
Alta Vista – yep, they’re still around
Webcrawler

Find us on Twitter:
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare talk to Amy Ely (Marketing Manager) and Kim Salvino (Sr. Account Manager & Affiliate Evangelist) about the buy.at network. We talk about the network history and the special tools they have available for affiliates and merchants to use.

buy.at is a global affiliate network and a leading industry player in the UK. A wholly owned subsidiary of Digital Window, buy.at drives growth for over 300 of the world’s leading brands.

Learn more about buy.at:
Visit the buy.at blog
Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @buyatUS

Find us on Twitter:
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

Join your Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare and their guest Angel Djambazov, Custom Tailored Marketing and Managing Editor for Revenews. The topic for this episode is how affiliates that think “outside the box” and get on board with local niches and social technology will be just that much ahead of the game.

Couponing on Twitter and Social Media – Not the way to go. There is too much.

Groupon – online and local

Some things affiliates can do that are “out of the box” and can be very lucrative.
Virtual Products:
Zynga, Second Life

Tie virtual products to real life products, gifts
Gift the virtual product, but let them know the real product is available
Popshops – 48 million products – make a virtual product tie to a virtual goal then link to the physical product
Prints – virtual art – create and send as a real print not just a virtual print
Loxly Gallery, CafePress, Zazzle are perfect examples of sites that can be utilized. Always check with the merchant first!

Second Life – JCPenney failed there because you can get the products locally
Virtual High End items – Create unique products only available there
Create a virtual storefront

Twitter – smart merchants use it to manage customer service

Good affiliate talks about snowboard bindings, gives good information, then tweets the link with the information in answer to questions or complaints. Offer alternatives, give links to reviews and share your experience with a product.

Mice – right handed, for left handers tell them where to find mice that are ergonomic for left handed people
Extension of review sites, more recommendations, tell why the products you recommend are better, don’t just sell. Tell people why they should buy the product you are promoting.

Jones Soda as wedding favors
Keen Shoes – why are they better than other sandals

Facebook app – needs to serve a new function with a new purpose

Set up a Facebook group vs a page – more interaction

Own local – Foursquare – have a local meeting at a place you are an affiliate for, post photos to flickr, drive customers to links on your site to sell.

Find us on Twitter:
Angel Djambazov
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

Join your Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare and their guest Angel Djambazov, Custom Tailored Marketing and Managing Editor for Revenews. The topic for this episode is Emerging Technologies, the affiliates that think “outside the box” and get on board with new technology will be just that much ahead of the game.

Pay per Call:
Ring Revenue
Shareasale
Commission Junction
LinkShare

Plugs phone “leak” – good for merchants where shoppers make calls
Pay per lead, more frequently pay per length of call
Affiliates get their own phone number
Good for high priced merchants

Legacy Learning Affiliate Program – up 30% with pay per call

Smart Phone Apps:
Jones Soda – Affiliate created a special iPhone app
Affiliate will need to work carefully with a merchant on something like this
Needs to be something special, not just a “go buy”.

What cool interactive thing can affiliate approach merchant with, must be interactive
Game plan proposal
Acceptance, legal agreement with merchant, needs access to merchant api, graphics that wouldn’t normally be available.

Customization merchants would be good to approach, like Zazzle

Merchants don’t have the technology or time to develop themselves.

Don’t create another “coupon app” – there are enough, Apple stops allowing duplicate or similar apps.
Don’t limit to iPhone, go into other Smart Phone platforms as well – Droid, Blackberry, etc.

Site where you can build an iPhone App

We would love it if you can leave comments about other emerging technologies, and links to resources for building phone apps.

Find us on Twitter:
Angel Djambazov
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney ( a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

Join your Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare for a discussion with Jenny Richman DeVore about Land the Interview Resume Editing, Interview Coaching, and Individually Targeted Job Search Consulting site and affiliate program. In today’s economy there are a lot of people that are looking for jobs and affiliates can point these job seekers to Land the Interview.

Jenny Richman DeVore has been an expert writer and editor for 15 years. She began her career as a Broadcast Journalist, then went into Public Relations where she began using the written word to sell – selling both her clients’ products and her own knowledge of the industry. She sold herself so well that she started making appearances on TV and Radio shows all over the country, being touted an expert in her field.

Visit the Land the Interview website and join the affiliate program.

Find us on Twitter:
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney ( a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

Join your Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare for a discussion about HTML sites still ranking in the wave of using CMS and blog platforms. Good old html sites still rank and convert…

Find us on Twitter:
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney ( a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Join your Affiliate ABCs host Deborah Carney and guest Eric Nagel as they talk about the importance of networks, both online and in person at conferences like Affiliate Summit. As an affiliate Eric talks about talking to your affiliate managers and to other affiliates.

Links from the Podcast:
“Worst mistake you’ve made” thread at ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum
both sides of the tracks podcast with Eric Nagel and Jason Rubacky
Geekcast.fm

Find us on Twitter:
Eric Nagel
Deborah Carney ( a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare talk to Legacy Learning Affiliate Program Manager Matt McWilliams about how affiliates can best promote the Legacy family of products. In this Affiliate ABCs Merchant Spotlight, we talk about the various ways the Legacy Learning programs can be promoted, the creatives available and target audiences you might not know about or think of. We had some technical difficulties at the end, so it actually ends rather abruptly.

Some links mentioned in the show:

Legacy Learning Affiliate Program Blog
Spinach Artichoke Dip Recipe
Legacy Learning ABestWeb Forum
Affiliate site
Legacy Learning Website
Join the Legacy Learning Affiliate Program

Find us on Twitter:
Matt McWilliams
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Many thanks to GeekCast.fm for hosting the Affiliate ABCs podcasts!

Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards “Affiliate Manager of the Year” Matt McWilliams joins Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare discuss how are some ways that affiliates can maximize their communication with their affiliate program managers. A lot of affiliates are shy and hesitate to talk to affiliate managers and outsourced program managers because they “aren’t big enough” or they are afraid they are interrupting the manager. In truth, lots of affiliate managers are very glad to hear from affiliates and would love to give them advise and tips about how to promote their programs.

Some highlights:

*Find out if your merchant has a dedicated affiliate manager or an OPM (Outsourced Program Manager)
*Be sure the affiliate manager/OPM is available whichever way is best for you. Good ones will be available via, phone, email, IM and forums.
*Don’t be afraid to ask for creatives, advise, tips
*If you are promoting them successfully, ask for a commission increase. If you are a promoting a competitor successfully, show them and ask for a commission increase to change some of those links for the new program.

*Advantages of using instant messaging: can drop links to each other, instant feedback for both manager and affiliate

Some links mentioned in the show:
Legacy Learning Affiliate Program Blog
ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum
Legacy Learning Website
Join the Legacy Learning Affiliate Program

Find us on Twitter:
Matt McWilliams
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards “Affiliate Manager of the Year” Matt McWilliams joins Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare to talk about what affiliates should look for when evaluating a merchant to promote. One of the toughest decisions an affiliate has to make is which merchants to give the real estate on their website to. Matt, Deborah and Vinny have a candid discussion about what to look for to be sure a merchant is worth promoting and is worth “above the fold” attention (or not).

Some highlights:
*Find merchants in the networks you belong to and search by category or keywords

Take a look at the merchant from the Consumer perspective::
*First impression – would you shop there?
*Do they have “leaks” (banners to other sites, adsense, send shoppers away)?
*If there are links to other sites, do they actually track back to the affiliate program? Some merchants cross track with others.
*Easy to navigate? FAQ? Shipping information? Contact information, About Us, Whois Information matches the site About Us information?
*What is the shopping process like? Is it easy or are there roadblocks? Is there a prompt to call to complete the order? Is it secure?

Now look from the Affiliate perspective:
*Compare commissions, cookie duration, other program terms to other similar programs.
*Appropriate banners? Text links?
*Is it a site that you would promote with a datafeed? Do they have one? Is it well categorized? Is it available in 3rd party tools you may be working with?
*Send a note to the affiliate manager if there is something you would like created, see if they respond. Is there contact information?
*For Shareasale merchants: Are they on Auto Deposit?
*For any other network, what happens if the merchant’s balance with the network goes offline? Is there a way to check the merchants online/offline history?

Some links mentioned in the show:

Legacy Learning Affiliate Program Blog
ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum
Legacy Learning Website
Join the Legacy Learning Affiliate Program

Find us on Twitter:
Matt McWilliams
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney ( a.k.a. Loxly)
Affiliate ABCs
Geekcast.fm

Affiliate ABCs episode 24 is all about networking at Affiliate Summit, focused on the ASW10 in January in Las Vegas. Hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare are joined by Jim Kukral who is the emcee once again. From the interesting <a href="http://www.affiliatesummit.com/10w-agenda/"keynotes to discussions about sessions including Jim’s session on getting motivated and Deborah’s panel about mommybloggers and affiliate marketing, we highlight some of the fun and seriousness that makes up Affiliate Summit.

Be sure to listen to this podcast too, to see how people who networked made a difference to their bottom line. Affiliate Summit was one piece of that puzzle…

Meet us all at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas – here’s a coupon for $100 off any pass.
Parties at Affiliate Summit

A little more about Jim:
A graduate of The University of Akron with a BA in Public Relations and a minor in Sales & Marketing, Jim has spent time working for publicly traded firms and small businesses alike. Jim’s work and experience in the Internet marketing industry has branded him as a leading thinker and thought-leader in the community.

Follow us all on twitter:
AffiliateSummit
Jim Kukral
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Vinny O’Hare
AffiliateABCs

Many thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts and many other educational and entertaining podcasts related to all things geeky

Affiliate ABCs episode 23 is another in our series of “Back in the Day” profiles of an internet and affliate marketing pioneer. Hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare are joined by Jim Kukral who started his journey online back in 1995. We talk about Jim’s transition from web designer to affiliate marketer to coach and consultant, with a lot of laughs along the way…

We dug up a couple of Jim’s first sites using the Wayback Machine:
iQuit.com (which he eventually sold)
AffiliateMakeover.com

We also talked about how we all got help with affiliate marketing along the way from ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing forum and how networking helps all of us.

Meet us all at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas – here’s a coupon for $100 off any pass.

A little more about Jim:
A graduate of The University of Akron with a BA in Public Relations and a minor in Sales & Marketing, Jim has spent time working for publicly traded firms and small businesses alike. Jim’s work and experience in the Internet marketing industry has branded him as a leading thinker and thought-leader in the community.

Follow us all on twitter:
Jim Kukral
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Vinny O’Hare
AffiliateABCs

Many thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts and many other educational and entertaining podcasts related to all things geeky

In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare talk about using video to drive traffic to your website and also how to use it on your affiliate website to also drive sales.

Some sites mentioned are:
TubeMogul.com
YouTube.com
Shareasale.com
Team Loxly Video of making matcha tea.
Vinny’s Youtube Channel

Contact us with ideas for future podcasts or comments or questions below or via Twitter:
@vinnyohare
@loxly

And to see videos of the kitten that interrupted us and how she helps drive traffic to a Cat Resource website check out this Youtube account – CoolCatSites

Podcast is hosted by GeekCast.fm

Affiliate ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare explain how a stupid post on Twitter found a niche affiliate market by accident. We break down and find a niche after Vinny was slapped on Twitter by a few women after he made a remark about breast feeding.

Things we covered are:
Finding products for the breastfeeding niche.
Finding topics for the site and how he would go about making an affiliate site for the niche.
Using the hashtag on Tweetdeck for finding niches.
Using adwords account to find if there is an interest for a site.
Searching for a domain for the topic.
Developing content based on the adwords keywords search

Twitter links and more:
@clairelouise2
Claire’s Blog
@RadicaLactivist
@kitchenwitch
@Morgaine_LaFay

Follow your hosts on twitter:
@loxly
@vinnyohare
@affiliateabcs
@GeekCast

As always, big thanks to GeekCast for hosting the Affiliate ABCs podcasts.

Shawn Collins shares his insights on the history of affiliate marketing and it’s evolution to the present with Affiliate ABCs host Deborah Carney. This is a little longer than our podcasts generally are, but it is facinating information. So much so that it is the first in a series of podcasts with industry folks that have been around a while that will share their stories about the history of our industry. The show notes are also lengthy and quite amusing and enlightening

This podcast was inspired by a blog post Shawn wrote several years ago on Clickz and his Clickz articles archive is located here.

More fun links:
Club Mom Affiliate Support Site (from Archives.org)
VelocityNYC.com – recently repurposed
babylounge.com – mentioned and now redirected
New York Affiliate Managers Watch out, there’s a pop that firefox blocked for me. Shawn in a bow tie?
Refer-it – Remember them? Plus more great links to historical articles.
Affiliate Summit

If you wrote articles that chronicle the history, feel free to drop them in the comments here, and if you would like to be on an Affiliate ABCs “Back in the Day” Podcast, email me at abcs at teamloxly.com

Be sure to follow AffiliateABCs on Twitter too.

Host Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly) and guest affiliate marketer Brian Darrow discuss how affiliates can use datafeeds and what merchants need to know about how affiliate use datafeeds, and how merchants can make their feeds better. Brian provided a nice outline for this podcast:

I. What they are/advantages of using them
A. “Long Tail” traffic
B. Automated content

II. Potential pitfalls in using data feeds
A. Duplicate content
B. “Thin” content

III. Methods of processing data feeds
A. Automated
B. Manual
C. Tracking Results

IV. Not all data feeds are created equal
A. Infrequently Updated
B. Short on data
C. Misinformation

Listen along as moderator Lisa Picarille leads a discussion about affiliates and Trademark Bidding with Deborah Carney and affiliate marketer Joe Sousa

In the wide ranging discussion we defined trademark bidding; discussed when it’s a good thing for affiliates and when it’s good for merchants; gave examples of when it makes no sense; the motivation behind merchant’s decisions to forbid trademark bidding; how some affiliates game the system; what it takes to police these policies; how to educate merchants and affiliates on the topic; software that helps affiliates do trademark bidding and more.

Here’s the rest of the story and the podcast.

In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your host Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly) discusses email marketing with Aweber with Justin Premick, Director of Education Marketing at Aweber. This episode gets into more advanced topics and more depth on the value of building your list, and how to use it effectively.

Post on thank you pages (with free HTML for embedding audio on your own thank you page):
Integrating WordPress with AWeber (includes video):
Integrating Blogger with AWeber (includes video):
Integrating AWeber and Twitter (no video here, sorry):
Twitter:
@aweber
@justinpremick
@loxly
@affiliateabcs

In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your host Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly) discusses email marketing with Aweber with Justin Premick, Director of Education Marketing at Aweber. This episode covers the basics and we took questions in advance which Justin got to answer. Part 2 gets into more advanced topics and more depth.

Here are some relevant notes, more in the next post!
AWeber’s Webinars

4-part series on getting more subscribers for your
blog newsletter:
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-subscribe-page.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-sharing.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-beyond-blog.htm

Follow us on Twitter:
@JustinPremick
@aweber
@loxly

And here’s a link to Part 2 of the Aweber Podcast

With Affiliate Summit East in August 2009 being in their “backyard”, New York City native Vinny O’Hare and newly transplanted NYC resident Deborah Carney share their “must sees” and easy to get to from the show hotel attractions in New York. From the Hilton it is easy to get to Times Square, Rockefeller Center and for the adventurous, easy train ride to Ground Zero and the Staten Island Ferry.

Listen along and get some tips on the fun and historic places to go and see while you are here.

Follow @VinnyOHare and @loxly (Debbie) on Twitter and hit them up with questions about what to see and where to eat either ahead of time or during the show.

In Affiliate ABCs #14 host Deborah Carney (a.k.a Loxly) interviews guest Cathy Stucker about her service that links bloggers (or webmasters) with other bloggers and writers appropriately named Blogger Link Up. BLU, as Cathy refers to it, is an email newsletter that currently has four ways for bloggers/webmasters to use it:

Request Guest Posts
Offer Guest Posts
Request Sources for Interviews
Offer Products for Review

There are other similar services, like Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out, but BLU is more focused as a tool to create relationships between webmasters/bloggers and HARO is more focused on actual media connections. They are complimentary tools, and you probably want to subscribe to both.

As an affiliate looking for more content for your site, you can take advantage of BLU to make connections, and to get ideas also. You might see a guest blogger offering content that is in your niche but from an angle you didn’t consider or that you aren’t able to write effectively about.

One question I have been asked when talking about Blogger Link Up with people is they want to know why they shouldn’t just submit their articles to article directories (like ezinearticles, ideamarketers or any of the others) and the answer is simple, still submit your articles there, and go find artilces there, but use BLU to make personal contact with people so that you can get guest posts that are more targeted and offer your articles directly to blogs that really need your content so that you both benefit. It’s all about the personal touch and making direct connections.

The sources area is great for finding sources to quote for articles, and for finding people to interview for podcasts as well.

And the products for review is very valuable for affiliates to find things that are appropriate to their sites to obtain to review and put you in touch with merchants that are willing to give you items for contests or giveaways also.

Listen for tips from both Deborah on how she uses the service, and Cathy about why she started it, how she knows people are using it and where she hopes to take it in the future.

Links from the podcast:
Blogger Link Up Newsletter
Twitter: @CathyStucker
Cathy’s Idea Lady Website
Cathy’s Blog

Hosted by GeekCast.fm

The topic for this episode of Affiliate ABCs comes from a Twitter DM and from people asking “How did you get your start?”. What did you do? So your hosts Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly) and Vinny (a.k.a. NYFalcon) take a few minutes and explain just how they got into this business.

Show links:
ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum
Affiliate Summit
NYFalcon Forum
James Martell
@SandwichInk

@loxly
@nyfalcon

Host Deborah Carney talks to travel specialist Kelly Gillease about what creatives affiliates should use to promote travel merchants.

Some other links you might find helpful:
SEMCast with Kelly Gillease
Follow Kelly on Twitter
Kelly’s Blog
Follow Loxly on Twitter
Viator Travel Affiliate Program Details at Team Loxly

This episode of Affiliate ABCs focuses on the changing rules for the Direct to Merchant (DTM) Pay per Click (PPC) strategy that many affiliates have been using for several years. Major merchants like Amazon and EBay recently said that they will no longer allow affiliates to use the merchant site as their landing pages in PPC campaigns. What this means is that affiliates that never built websites now need to learn how to do so and how to make landing pages that convert.

Guest Kelly Gillease talks with host Deborah Carney on how this practice has been used and why affiliates should have been sending the traffic direct to their own websites all along. And more importantly, how those affiliates can modify their practices to change with the new requirements.

SEMCast with Kelly Gillease
Follow Kelly on Twitter
Kelly’s Blog
Follow Loxly on Twitter
Team Loxly

Social Media can be a powerful traffic driver, just make sure your content doesn’t just live at the Social Media sites. In Affiliate ABCs podcast #10 Debbie (a.k.a Loxly) and Vinny (a.k.a NYFalcon) explain how to use social media sites to drive traffic to your website by interacting in communities and online social settings. And it doesn’t have to take up all of your time to be effective either.

Links mentioned in the show:
MySpace Account for Awesome Wreckage Website
Facebook
Orkut Social Network
Loxly’s Twitter
Awesome Wreckage Twitter
Roboform – Keep track of all your logins
Knowem.com – Check on and register all your social media identities
TwitterFeed – Feed your blogs to your Twitter accounts

There are probably more places to host your content for free these days on the internet than there are paid hosts. Between the free sites and the social networks where you can have a profile and maybe a page or even a blog, there are many people saying “Why should I host on my own domain?”. And there are just as many people saying “Why would I want to drive people to xxx instead of to my own site?”. In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your hosts Deborah Carney (a.k.a Loxly) and Vinny a.k.a NYFalcon address these questions and tell you how to use your own hosted website as a homebase and all those “other places” as traffic cops to get the traffic safely to your home.

And remember, you want to own your own content, you don’t want to give it away to another company and you certainly don’t want to worry about being censored or your content “disappearing”.

Let us know if you have any questions, post them here or follow us on Twitter and drop them there:
Loxly
NYFalcon

And the Twitter account mentioned in the podcast: AwesomeWreckage

Today on AffiliateABCs Shawn Collins joins Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly to talk about taking photographs for and using photographs on websites. They cover topics like what camera to chose, how many megapixels, when to use a tripod and how to resize. In addition they talk a bit about video, green screens and when you might need to use a stock photo service. Feel free to post questions here that we can answer either here or in a future podcast!

A little background (or “why you should pay attention to Deborah”): Deborah has been a professional photographer for 30 years, including photographing weddings, other social events and conferences, on location cat shows, as well as a fine art photographer. She has been creating websites for 15+ years, that all included photographs optimized for the web, because back then they had to be since we were all on dialup! A selection of her photos hang in a hotel here and there, homes and offices, and are published in several cat breed books, as well as being scattered all over the web and some newspaper publishing along the way.

Sites and products discussed in the show:
Sony Alpha Series DSLRs (Deborah’s Camera)
Casio Exilim Card Line (Shawn’s current camera)
Casio Exilim EX-FH20 New camera for Shawn? Looks like a nice all around camera.
Fugifilm S Series Another nice alternative for a general use camera.
Flickr Camera Finder – Click on a camera brand and search for images taken with that camera to help you see the image quality and decide on a camera to purchase

Recommended Tripod (It is less expensive than I stated in the podcast! Yay )
Targus Tripod

Photo Editing Software:
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 or 9 – do a search on Amazon or Ebay for copies of this older software. (Sorry Shawn, version 6 doesn’t even show up on searches! )
GIMP Free Image Editing software

Green Screen Software

If you need stock photos of subjects you don’t have images of:
iStockPhoto You can choose from pay as you go or subscription.
ShutterstockSeveral plans from a few images yearly to a LOT on a monthly subscription. Good selection, midrange cost.
Jupiter ImagesPricey, but great if you are a publisher that needs a lot of high res images.

If you are looking for an alternative to stock photos check out Flickr and images licensed under Creative Commons:
Creative Commons on Flickr
Creative Commons Licensing
Example of a search for images licensed for use with Attribution and Share A Like License from Affiliate Summit Social Media event.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a comment or email Deborah at dc at teamloxly.com

In this podcast Viator Affiliate Manager Deborah Carney and Viator Marketing Director Kelly Gillease talk about how affiliates can leverage the travel market on their websites. Whether your affiliate site focuses on travel or not, you can successfully promote travel merchants, including hotels, airlines, tours and aggregators like Expedia. Gardening sites, family sites and especially bargain oriented sites can benefit from promoting travel products in the current economy. To quote Kelly “People are not planning to stay home, they are still going to travel.”

Some areas to focus on are the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, before and after since the hotels are adding capacity and will be offering deals to get them filled and a surprising popular travel destination is Iceland. Their currency has fallen in value so there are deals there to take advantage of.

You can also hear Kelly at her own podcast SEMcast over at GeekCast.fm.

Be sure to follow Deborah and Kelly on Twitter and visit their blogs:
Inhouse SEM (Kelly)
Team Loxly (Deborah)

And listen to our Viator Merchant Spotlight Podcast if you missed it

More information about the Viator Affiliate Program

For Affiliate ABCs sixth podcast Loxly and NYFalcon talk about some things that every website needs to have and why. Things new affiliates may not think about like Privacy policy and About us.

Sites Mentioned:
NYFalcon.com has the basic templates you can use to customize to your own site needs.

Today’s edition of Affiliate ABCs is a little different. Hosted by Deborah Carney with guest Kelly Gillease, the Marketing Director for Viator.com. As part of Affiliate ABCs we want to do some Merchant Spotlights, where affiliates can learn how to best promote a specific merchant. Our first merchant is one that we are very familiar with, Team Loxly has been managing the Viator Travel and Tours Affiliate Program for a year and they recently moved to the Shareasale network and relaunched. Many affiliates ask how is the best way to promote Viator and want to know how to include them in their sites, so that inspired us to do this podcast.

Let us know if this is beneficial to you and let us know which merchants you want us to interview in future podcasts!

Links:
Viator Affiliate Support Forum at ABestWeb
Team Loxly Viator Program Information
Viator.com
Sign up for Viator at Shareasale.com

People are already responding to Getting Started with Twitter Part 1 so here is Part 2! In Part 2 we cover creating posts, how and when to Retweet, and what are some good examples of who is using Twitter in business. We talk about hashtags, Twitter Search and Twitter parties.

Twitter accounts we reference in the podcast:

http://twitter.com/JetBlue
http://twitter.com/Starbucks
http://twitter.com/DirectTV
http://twitter.com/Mashable
http://twitter.com/ProBlogger
http://twitter.com/skydiver
http://twitter.com/sfzoo
http://twitter.com/GeorgiaAquarium

And here is the link to the Twitter Search using the #asw09 hashtag to follow the goings on at the summit.

Some more folks you might want to be following on Twitter if you are interested in affiliate marketing:
MissyWard
AffiliateSummit
ShawnCollins and AffiliateTip
Haiko

And of course, your hosts:
NYFalcon
Loxly

A tip we didn’t mention in the podcast about finding followers is to find people you admire and listen to and see who *they* are following. Click on those names to see if you like what they have to say, and then follow them. Or not One of the beautiful things about Twitter is that you can follow a conversation using Twitter Search or just by clicking on people’s names. You can read them without following them, and even @ reply to them without following them.

As always, feel free to post questions below or in our twitter thread at ABestWeb or the NYFalcon forum. Affiliate ABCs series isn’t just about Twitter, but it seems to be a hot topic right now, and it is a great way to build a following for your site/company so we will probably do another podcast or two about using it. Also feel free to post requests for future shop topics that *aren’t* about Twitter

Many thanks to the folks over at GeekCast.fm for hosting our show, be sure to head over there and listen to their other great podcasts.

Affiliate ABCs #3 is focused on how to get started using Twitter, a popular messaging platform that is being referred to as microblogging. Some people object to that classification, and Twitter itself has a prompt above the message box that says “What are you doing”. It started as a way for people to succinctly state what they are doing at any given moment. You have 140 character limit to say what you are doing. Some people took this literally and would post things like “going to the bathroom” or other nonsense that really no one does want to hear.

The intelligent folks that were introduced to Twitter started using it to say what they were currently doing in a different way: “I just made a blog post about my new coffeemaker and I’m enjoying a cup of Breakfast Blend right now. Here’s the link.” or “I’m @asw09 listening to @skydiver and @jimkukral talk about pitching your press release to newspapers and bloggers.” Now people are realizing that “What are you doing” isn’t about what you are eating or what you are doing that no one cares about, but what you are doing that relates to your business and personal life that people would want to know about.

We’ll get into more advanced ways to use Twitter as we go along, but for now, here is our podcast about getting started, setting up an account, making sure you have a profile and avatar, determining your audience, and finding people to follow you. We touch on the mechanics of setting up an account and starting to interact to determine how you can best use twitter. As always, feel free to post questions below or in our ABCs Plus Forum.

Your hosts for this show are Vinny and Debbie Carney a.k.a Loxly. Our main twitter accounts are:

http://twitter.com/vinnyohare
http://twitter.com/loxly

Here is the account we set up during the podcast so you can follow along as it grows:
http://twitter.com/vacationdude

Also mentioned in the podcast:
http://search.twitter.com
http://twitter.com/loxlygallery

Many thanks to the folks over at GeekCast.fm for hosting our show, be sure to head over there and listen to their other great podcasts.

The first 15 Minute Lesson from NYFalcon and Loxly was pretty off the cuff and we started talking about A/B testing which peaked some people’s interest. So here is a 15 Minute lesson where we talk about it. Have a listen, then post any followup questions here or over in the threads at ABCs Plus Forum.

NyFalcon (Vinny O’Hare) and Loxly (Deborah Carney) sit down and try their hand at podcasting. Here is the first episode of the show “Affiliate ABCs”. Let us know what you think! For our first podcast we basically talked about the weather, flip flops, A & B testing, page formats, and generally just talked about making money online. It is all very rough but I am sure we will get better once we have a set format.

We are taking questions for future episodes, post your questions as comments here or in this thread over at the ABCs Plus forum.

This podcast is for newbies to affiliate marketing, so shoot us those questions you are afraid to ask the “gurus”. Warning though, we don’t do ebooks or lead gen affiliate marketing, we talk about retail affiliate marketing on sites that are built to last That’s our specialty.