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

Since so many bloggers are podcasting or are interested in podcasting, Deborah Carney and Daniel Clark decided to share how they record each of theirs. They talk about equipment, software and all things podcasty and geeky.

Be sure to check out our first podcast with Daniel here.

Geek Dads Weekly – formerly Geek Dads @ Home
Ubercaster
Audio Hijack Pro
GarageBand
Audacity
Plantronics DSP400 Foldable Multimedia Headset

Follow Host Deborah Carney on Twitter @loxly and our show @BloggingABCs

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

Blogging ABCs #5 is all about using social media to drive traffic to your blog. Host Deborah Carney is joined by Wendy Limauge who shares how she uses social media. Hopefully that will help give you ideas on how to get more traffic to your blog.

Sweeties Swag
Wendy on Facebook
@sweetiesswag
Wendy on Linkedin
Sweeties Secret Sweeps Membership Site
The Mommybloggers Guide
Wendy’s Lifetime TV blog

Follow Host Deborah Carney on Twitter @loxly and our show @BloggingABCs

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

Merchant ABCs Episode #2 is a Case Study with Mom Entrepreneur Stephanie Elie, owner of LaLa Baby Boutique. Your host Deborah Carney talks to Stephanie about taking her existing online store to the next level with an affiliate program. We will be following Stephanie through the process and hope that other merchants will “learn as we go”.

LaLa Baby Boutique is an online baby and maternity boutique that caters to mom who aren’t afraid to maintain their sense of style when they become parents. You will find unique baby t-shirts, stylish diaper bags, flattering maternity t-shirts and more at LaLa Baby. We look for unique products that can’t be found out your local chain store.

LaLa Baby Boutique
@lalababy
LaLa Baby on Facebook

Follow Host Deborah Carney on Twitter @loxly and our show @MerchantABCs

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

Merchant ABCs is hosted by Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare of Team Loxly internet marketing. In this first episode they talk to merchants that are considering setting up an affiliate program and outline what merchants need to know before making the jump into creating an affiliate program.

Things we will be doing in future podcasts:
Case Studies
Merchant reviews

Covered in this podcast:
Setting up and starting an affiliate program.
Whether you should have an affiliate program.

What is an affiliate

Our podcasts focus on Retail, not ebooks or information products, or lead generation affiliate marketing

Something that people need

PMS – Solve a problem – Problem Make Solution
Set up your site to sell – affiliates won’t promote a site that isn’t already converting.

Get a consultant to optimize your site for conversions before you even think about about adding an affiliate program.

After your site is optimized to sell, decide if you want to have an inhouse or network affiliate tracking solution.

Affiliates get paid commission, networks get a commission and may have a monthly minimum.

Managing your program – networks don’t manage and recruit, they are just for tracking and payment. We don’t recommend adding the network services for management, they may not be in your best interests.

Some things to think about for your program Terms of Service

Network Vs Inhouse

Set up – Graphics, text links, other creatives

Affiliate Manager – Inhouse or Outsourced. Sales manager or PR person shouldn’t be the guy running the affiliate program. Outsourced Program Manager – OPM – company that manages multiple programs, short term or long term.

OPM – can find you good graphics people, help you decide on a network, introduce your program to appropriate affiliates – they are your shortcut to do things the right way.

Merchant – Affiliate – Network – OPM/Inhouse AM

Affiliate links to your site, the links track through the Network or your inhouse tracking – shopper goes to your site and completes purchase. Network takes the affiliate commission and their fee at the time of the purchase, but is invisible to the shopper.

Links to companies mentioned in the show:
Outsourced Program Managers
Shareasale
Commission Junction
Google Affiliate Network
Linkshare

Zen Cart
osCommerce

Affiliate Summit West and East

Follow us on Twitter:
Merchant ABCs @MerchantABCs
Deborah Carney @loxly
Vinny O’Hare @vinnyohare

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

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

Blogging ABCs Episode #4 has another wonderful blogger guest Stephanie Elie joining your host Deborah Carney. Stephanie and Deborah discuss how Stephanie got started and her advice for other bloggers. A candid and fun look at a blog that talks about being an entrepreneur, mom and blogger all at the same time!

About BizzieMommy
Mom Entrepreneur and Mommy Blogger, Stephanie shares ideas, support and resources for work at home moms and mom entrepreneurs.
BizzieMommy Blog
@bizziemommy
BizzieMommy on Facebook

Follow Host Deborah Carney on Twitter @loxly and our show @BloggingABCs

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

For Blogging ABCs Episode #3 your host Deborah Carney is joined by blogger Daniel Clark from the blog (and podcast) Geek Dads at Home. Daniel and Joe Magennis blog about being work from home dads, with the accompanying challenges and rewards. Daniel talks about how they got started and what they are doing to monetize their blog and podcast. In a future Blogging ABCs episode Daniel talks about what it takes to have a podcast associated with a blog.

Links discussed in the show:
Daniel’s Blog and Geek Dads at Home Blog and Podcast
The Geek Dads Holiday Gift Guide
Joe Magennis’ Blog

Follow Host Deborah Carney on Twitter @loxly and our show @BloggingABCs

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

Listen in for Blogging ABCs Episode #2 as your host Deborah Carney interviews blogger Wendy Limauge and talks to her about how she got started and how she is working to monetize her blogs. Wendy will be joining Deborah at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas in January 2010 on a panel about how mommybloggers could be changing the face of affiliate marketing.

Wendy is very open about her blogs and what she does to make them profitable. She would like to help other bloggers be able to skip some of the mistakes she has made and get right to the “good stuff”. We will also have a podcast from her about how she uses social media.

Links mentioned in our show:
Sweeties Swag
Wendy on Facebook
@sweetiesswag
Wendy on Linkedin
Sweeties Secret Sweeps Membership Site
The Mommybloggers Guide
Wendy’s Lifetime TV blog

Follow Host Deborah Carney on Twitter @loxly and our show @BloggingABCs

Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our show, visit them to listen to other industry related podcasts

Welcome to the first episode of our new podcast series – Blogging ABCs. Your host Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare plan to take you through the world of blogging and help you not only create great blogs, but monetize them as well. Plans include case studies, blogger portraits and informational blogs that include a wide variety of guests.

Links mentioned in this show:

Places to blog:
Wordpress.org – To get the software to install on your own website
Thesis Premium Wordpress Theme
Wordpress.com – you can’t place ads or use affiliate marketing at Wordpress.com but you can promote your own personal products.
Blogger.com – Hosted solution if you want to start out with a free service

Resources:

Show about Who Owns Your Content? – and a Feedfront Article to help you decide what blogging platform to use.
BloggerLinkUp – Great place to hook up with potential guest bloggers
Show about using BloggerLinkUp
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Be sure to follow your hosts on Twitter:
Deborah – @loxly
Vinny – @vinnyohare
Blogging ABCs own account – @bloggingabcs

Show is hosted by Geekcast.fm

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.

Recently a group of people were invited to a special networking event hosted by the Shareasale network and during casual conversation some information was shared that helped an affiliate make sales for a merchant they hadn’t worked with because they were unaware the merchant had items on his site that fit hers. Well, that spurred a thought process that let to following a trail that spanned 4 years that made those sales.

Billy Kay, Jen Goode, and Carolyn Tang join Affiliate ABCs host Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly at several forums) to talk about how they all came to know each other and banded together to make something special happen. This isn’t a podcast about how to network, but what happens when you *do* network.

Longer than normal, but worth every minute. Share your own networking story in the comments, or email abcs at teamloxly.com to be on our podcast to share your story!

Revenews Article by Billy Kay
Skype
ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum
The Mail Order Shoppe
The Personalized Gifts Affiliate Program
Affiliate Summit
eComExpo

Network with them all on Twitter:
@billykay
@loxly
@jgoode
@catango
@shareasale
@affiliateabcs

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

We are expanding to include actual courses you can take to make you a better merchant and better affiliate marketer and a better self marketer. We found a service called Prfessor that at first we thought was all hype, then after digging into it found out that it is a great new service to be able to serve up a variety of content in an organized class fashion. Follow along with us as we start to use this service to help educate you on being a better internet marketer.

Listen to this Podcast hosted by Matthew Bredel to learn more about Deb and her strategies and advice on how to make money online through marketing physical products.

Too few people are affiliate marketers for physical products (and there is so much more opportunity to effectively promote it versus information…that is, if you do it right!).

Also, Matthew designed a poster for the Loxly Gallery Passion Collection that you might want to check out:

His quote: “A little bit of courage and faith will take you soaring on adventures you never imagined”.

Deborah Carney was pleased to be a guest on an AffPlan podcast about how merchants can best provide datafeeds and how affiliates are using them along with Eric Nagel, president of Eric Nagel & Associates. Host Lisa Picarille moderated this episode about datafeeds in Affiliate Marketing.

Click here for the full 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 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

Direct to merchant (DTM) pay per click (PPC) advertising is being restricted more and more, with major merchants like Amazon and EBay recently saying 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. Even though many affiliates made a lot of money using DTM PPC, the technique has flaws that smart affiliates should have recognized long ago.

First, affiliates have been paying for traffic and sending it off to direct to the merchant. So when the merchant pulls the plug, as many are now doing, they don’t have any residual traffic to a website of their own. The affiliates perfected the keywords and ads, but instead of sending traffic to the merchant, if they had been sending the traffic to their own website they would A. be able to continue without an issue and B. would have been building a site that had some authority and customer trust.

Next if the affiliate had their own landing pages, they could have been building a mailing list to use to contact people about similar or better products. Not a spam list, but a real list built from people that were interested in the product being promoted and possibly other similar products that can be featured on the same site. You can’t go back and change the past, but for the future look at this as an opportunity to do more for building a company brand.

Affiliates that are able to sell well through pay per click ads in the search engines have unique skills that many other people (not only affiliates, but merchants!) don’t have. Leveraging those skills to build traffic to their own websites and to build their own authority, credibility with shoppers, and email lists should take them to new levels that they weren’t aware they could achieve. If an affiliate isn’t good at building websites and landing pages, I recommend they partner with an affiliate that is good at that part, or go to sites such as elance and outsource the pieces they can’t do themselves. In the everchanging affiliate and online marketing landscape, the more you are able to utilize your skills and adapt to new requirements, the more successful you will be.

This was published in FeedFront Magazine Issue #7

Related Podcast

– By Deb Carney a.k.a. Loxly

Web sites need images to break up the text and show your visitors things you want them to see. Taking photos that you specifically want to use on a Web site is different than taking family photos or photos for print production.

First, they don’t have to be huge in size. You simply want an image that is big enough to show what you need, clear and properly exposed. Let’s take this step by step.

Good camera
It doesn’t have to be a DSLR to get good images to use on your Web site. You can use a small camera or even the camera in your phone, as long as it has good optics and exposure settings. The largest size image you want to show on a Web site is about 500×500 pixels, which is very small by today’s camera standards.
But you want that image to be super sharp. If your phone takes blurry underexposed pictures, don’t use it. Most digital cameras are fine for general photography.

If you need to take close ups of products, you will need a better camera, one with a “macro” mode that will let you get close to your subject. Be careful, though, with close up shots that you don’t use a lens that makes the subject distorted (fisheye effect).

And remember that since you don’t need large files you can crop to make the subject bigger.

Hold it Steady
Hold your camera steady when you are taking pictures that you are going to use online. If it is in the evening or at night and you don’t want to use a flash (like night shots in a city for a travel site) lean the camera on a light pole or a mailbox.

Anything that you can set the camera on that won’t move can be used as a makeshift tripod. Even if you have a tripod, some cities and parks don’t allow them to be used in certain areas without a permit.

Good Exposure
For daytime pictures, shooting outdoors in sunlight is usually fine, but avoid shooting directly into the sun. Indoors you want to use a flash to avoid images that are dark or have a yellow overtone to them.

Crop it
Use a photo editing software (most computers come with them now, and there are plenty of free ones) to crop your images and resize them.

The image that comes straight from the camera is WAY too big to use on your Web site. Don’t use the resize tags in your HTML code to make the file fit. Doing that uses valuable bandwidth and slows your page load time.

Open the picture in your editing software and use the crop function to eliminate extra space around your subject. Next resize the image so that it is 500 pixels on its longest edge. Then use File, Save As to save the modified version of your image.

Hopefully these tips will help you take pictures that will spice up your Web site and make a good impression on your site visitors.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 5 here

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

Your host Deborah Carney is joined on this series of podcasts by Esty seller Karen Helmrich, Unkamen Gifts. Follow along as Deborah gets started at Etsy setting up Cool Clay Jewelry, an Etsy shop to sell her own canvas, fabric, and prints on clay pendants and jewelry. This episode covers creating your product listing, which is where you sell your product to your customer.

Some urls mentioned in the show:
Etsy’s Blog
Karen’s Twitter
Deborah’s Twitter
Karen’s Blog
Our Handmade Gifts – More Etsy and Handmade Gift selling tips.

Be sure to leave questions or comments here, at the Make Your Mark Blog, and follow Make Your Mark on Twitter.

Your host Deborah Carney is joined on this series of podcasts by Esty seller Karen Helmrich, Unkamen Gifts. Follow along as Deborah gets started at Etsy setting up Cool Clay Jewelry, an Etsy shop to sell her own canvas, fabric, and prints on clay pendants and jewelry. This edition covers the nuts and bolts of setting up your shop.

Some urls mentioned in the show:
Etsy’s Blog
Karen’s Twitter
Deborah’s Twitter
Karen’s Blog
Our Handmade Gifts More Etsy and Handmade Gift selling tips.

Be sure to leave questions or comments here, at the Make Your Mark Blog, and follow Make Your Mark on Twitter.

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 social networks where you can have a profile, 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?”. Use your own hosted website as a homebase and all those “other places” as traffic cops to get the traffic safely to your home.

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”. Each “free” host has a catch, each social network has a Terms of Service that allows them to censor your content, and “own” your content. Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress.com (the hosted version, not the downloaded version) all have clauses that allow them to remove content that they feel is inappropriate. Wordpress.com controls whether you can advertise on your blog there or not. Blogger removed content from a blog that was managed on the blogger host, but was not even actually hosted there! You have the ability to publish from Blogger to your domain and as someone recently discovered, they can remove your content from that domain also. So beware.

Geocities is another example of a place where people hosted for free for years and years and thought they would never have to worry. Yahoo is shutting it down. Several other “free” hosting services through the years have done the same, some vanishing into the night without warning. Hypermart changed from free to paid accounts. If you didn’t upgrade *poof* content was gone.

Free sites have their place, and social networks are certainly great places to have a presence, but keep in mind that all your social marketing should be driving traffic to a central place, and that central place should be under *your* control. A domain you have purchased on hosting you pay for. It can be a simple set of pages that sell your product, a blog that you can change or a complex website, but at the end of the day, you are in control of it. And while we are on the subject, be sure you keep a local backup so that if your host goes down, you can move that content to a new host without worry, and quickly.

Anyone remember NBCi/Xoom.com? More recently, Podango? Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Flickr, YouTube and a myriad of other sites are wonderful for creating a presence and connecting with people. But don’t use your Facebook page as your presence on the web. Use it as a funnel to send people to your space where you control the content and the ads. Anytime you rely on another company or their business model to host your content, you are playing with fire.

We recently did a podcast on this subject that you can listen to here, and this article is also published in FeedFront Magazine, which Deborah is a regular contributor to.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here

Make Your Mark podcasts #2, 3 and 4 are focused on Etsy.com, a marketplace where artists and photographers can sell their original art, art and photography prints, plus anyone that creates anything handmade. This first one is an overview of how Etsy works and how to get started in a general introduction.

Your host Deborah Carney is joined on this series of podcasts by Esty seller Karen Helmrich, Unkamen Gifts. Follow along as Deborah gets started at Etsy setting up Cool Clay Jewelry, an Etsy shop to sell her own canvas, fabric, and prints on clay pendants and jewelry. Not much to see yet! But will be building over the next several weeks.

Some urls mentioned in the show:
Etsy’s Blog
Karen’s Twitter
Deborah’s Twitter
Karen’s Blog
Our Handmade Gifts Blog and Community

Be sure to leave questions or comments here, follow Make Your Mark on Twitter or email us any questions to makeyourmark at teamloxly.com

Welcome to the first edition of Make Your Mark. Today we talk about why you should have your own website to showcase your art and photography, even if you are selling online already through other companies, venues or websites.

This is a very basic podcast, if you already have a site that focuses on your art branding you might not want to listen, but if you are new and need direction, you are involved in sites like CafePress, Imagekind, Etsy or eBay, you will want to hear this.

After you listen to this podcast, I recommend you listen to:
Affiliate ABCs – Website Basics. This podcast talks about basic pages every website needs, whether you are an affiliate or an artist/photographer starting a website.

For those of you just joining us here is the intro podcast. And be sure to follow us on Twitter!

What would you like our next topic to be? Drop us a comment. Let us know if this podcast was helpful and what you need to know next. We have several planned topics, but we are flexible and want to hear what *you* have to say.

Make Your Mark is a new podcast where we will be talking about how to market your art and photography online using your own website, a variety of POD (Print On Demand) companies, places where you list originals for sale and many other means. This will include using online exposure to help you sell offline and the other way around.

Your host for Make Your Mark is Deborah Carney, former Affiliate Manager for POD (Print on Demand) companies CafePress and Imagekind, that currently has her own startup POD that specializes in art and photography prints.

To kick off we are going to be starting with the basics, like building a website and using that as a base for all your marketing. If you have questions you would like answered, if you would like to be interviewed for the show, either as a provider of a service for artists/photographers or as an artist/photographer that would like to learn more, send an email to makeyourmark at teamloxly.com.

Shortcuts to Make Your Mark “stuff”:
Podcast
Twitter
Facebook

Some of the pages still are being constructed, it’s a “work in progress” Be part of the construction by leaving us comments and letting us know what *you* want to hear about.

James Martell has a series of podcasts that people subscribe to, but this month he is giving one away. He and I did a Coffee Talk back in November about how to effectively use Twitter to grow your business. Today he released that Coffee Talk as part of his May Newsletter and it’s available to listen to here – If You Don’t Tweet, You Should.

A couple of show notes:
Viator Affiliate Program is now Shareasale exclusive, not at CJ as noted in the show.
James Martell on Twitter
Loxly on Twitter
Arlene on Twitter (Epilepsy Moms)
And links to join our Clients, including Loxly Gallery and Cool Card Shop, plus a couple new ones to be added in May

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 twitter thread at ABestWeb or the NYFalcon forum.

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

http://twitter.com/nyfalcon
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 either ABestWeb or the NYFalcon Forum

NyFalcon and Loxly sit down and try their hand at podcasting. Here is the first episode of the show “15 Minute Lessons by NYFalcon”. Let us know what you think!

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