I, too can now advertise on Google Adwords PPA

Well, not quite - I don’t advertise on Adwords CPC and one of the requirements to be eligible for beta-testing the PPA ads is that an advertiser must have generated atleast 500 conversions from their click campaigns in the past 30 days.

Nevertheless, Google has taken the PPA advertising platform global and is now allowing advertisers and publishers from around the world to participate in the CPA ad platform - which was limited to only US advertisers and publishers since first beta was announced three months ago. This would make google the primary and largest performance-based lead generation platform in many parts of the world.

This, once again, brings many affiliate marketers back to the question that was raised when the beta was first announced. “Will Google eat CJ and Linkshare alive?” Most affiliate marketers who have been in the industry long enough don’t think so. Google is on to something, but it isn’t quite affiliate marketing. they are an advertising company and adwords (CPC and CPA) is an advertising network - these are two different ballgames.

Sure, google could add to existing affiliate-marketing revenues, but the possibility of Adwords eating up a share of the existing affiliate-network pie is highly unlikely. The one way that google can really affect the affiliate networks of today, is if they do something about the newly acquired doubleclick and performics, like bringing the performics platform to all adsense publishers and adwords advertisers, making opening an affiliate program on performics as cost-effective as advertising on adwords. Such a thing, as of now, can’t be seen for quite some time in the future. Google seems to see Doubleclick as mostly a CPM based banner advertising platform. CJ and Linkshare are safe.

More on:

5 Star Blog, Cost Per News, Search Engine Journal, Inside adwords, Clickz

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e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

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eBay to sell radio ad spots

Reuters reports that, in direct competition with Google’s Radio Ads offering, eBay will soon begin to auction radio ad spots on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.’s recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

The new auction marketplace is set to go live on wednesday and include online as well as terrestrial radio stations.

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Apple store US Affiliate program moves to CJ from linkshare

A Little less than a week ago, we saw the Apple Store US and Canada Affiliate Program open on CJ.  Today, Apple announced this to all it’s linkshare affiliates:

We regret to inform you that Apple has made a business decision to shut down the Apple Store US and Apple Store Canada LinkShare Affiliate Programs. Please note that iTunes and .mac affiliate programs are not affected and are continuing to run their programs through the LinkShare Network.

Get ready to find and replace those linkshare links to the new CJ links! The current links will remain active up to the 30th of June.

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Selling ad spots on your website as hourly time slots

I was browsing techcrunch the other day, and noticed the ad of a sponsor there, Adicate - an online advertising network with a twist.

Adicate has taken the television advertising approach to the world of online advertising - they allow publishers to sell ad-spots on their websites - by the hour.

Adicate claims to already deliver as many as 35 million impressions each day using this model.

Their pitch is also pretty convincing. An email from them that I recieved upon requesting more information states:

One of the advantages with Adicate TimeAds is that advertisers can show their ads at their own prime time. This means that a medicine company can advertise for stimulants daytime, diet pills around dinnertime and sleeping aid at night time. This also gives the advertiser the unique opportunity to stand by waiting in the advertising period and interact with the customer immediately.

Now I don’t sell medicine, but this logic can potentially be applied to many other areas. For instance, advertising a job-site just before the end of the work day, etc.

I haven’t signed up with them as an advertiser (or publisher) yet, so it is still to be seen what kind of statistics and targeting they provide to advertisers - which can be a very crucial thing with such a system.

Nonetheless, looks like an interesting new concept and worth giving a try, although I am not too certain if adicate will be able to introduce and create the CPH (Cost Per Hour) advertising metric as a standard in online media.

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Linkshare Announces Webservices

This is one area where CJ can claim to have done it first.

Finally, Linkshare has announced today, a webservices offering (API?) for affiliates that they are calling the “Automated LinkGenerator”

From Their Email Announcement:

Automated LinkGenerator creates LinkShare affiliate links for any product on a merchant’s site that offers LinkGenerator. This new feature provides the same functionality as the LinkGenerator tool in the Individual Product Links interface, without having to log into the Affiliate Interface to get your links. This new tool does not replace Merchandiser (LinkShare’s datafeed), but will be helpful for getting direct links from merchants that do not offer Merchandiser feeds.

If you are interested in using the Automated LinkGenerator, please email us at linkgen_request@linkshare.com to have this new tool enabled. Once you are enabled, the Automated LinkGenerator will be located under the LinkShare Feed Synergy Services area of the Affiliate Interface. To create an Automated LinkGenerator link, you will use a REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services to request links for a given merchant URL. You will then send a URL from the merchant’s site to LinkShare using the specified link format (see the Automated LinkGenerator Help area).  The URL can be sent through a browser, a tool like wget or curl, or an automated script.  For each URL provided, LinkShare returns a click link.  You can request up to 1,000 links within an hour.

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Adsense Inside google maps

Read/write Web has a recent post that notes that google is soon (exact date unknown) going to integrate ads into Google Maps.

The good news for web publishers and developers is that Google would be sharing revenue from these ads to those sites and web-apps that have used Mapplets to create their google maps mashup.

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Google introduces the Tech B2B Knowledge Center

On the lines of the Retail knowledge center, google has just announced the launch of the “Tech B2B Knowledge Center” - a minisite with case studies, tips and tricks, ideas etc for B2B businesses that use Adwords as a medium of online advertising.

Google Tech B2B Knowledge Center 

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Widgets now live on shareasale

Brian littleton just twittered that shareasale’s much anticipated widget ad platform has just been activated.

Update: Announcement on shareasale’s blog.

As an affiliate, you can now preview and retrieve widget code for live use. Have fun!!!

Click the yellow link under the “Get Links” menu titled “Get Widgets”….

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P.S: this is my first blog post from a mobile phone ever!

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Affiliate Marketing at Yahoo Answers

We have seen affiliate marketers use new web 2.0 social platforms such as twitter and squidoo as a medium of promoting their websites - There is another social network I hadn’t previously taken very seriously as an affiliate marketing platform.

I just realized that affiliate markers are turning to yahoo’s answers service in a bid to drive traffic to their websites.

An affiliate I noticed is answering questions related to a particular niche and directing traffic to their website - what’s more, the affiliate is also using text-link-ads to drive traffic, not directly to their domain, but to the page on yahoo answers that has a link to the domain(that is how I came to know of this, a link was bought to a yahoo answers page on one of the niche blogs I sometimes write for).

This may seem like black or grey hat SEO to some, but I perceive it more as social media marketing, or what I sometimes call, “Participation marketing”. The affiliate is actively participating within the social media doing what he/she is expected to do, and making money in the process - without spending on domains, hosting, search marketing campaigns etc - driving probably what should be very handsome ROI.

On the negative side, I didn’t notice any disclaimer on the answers stating that the answerer owns the said website(s) for the purpose of profit - it would be a good idea to add such a disclaimer, just to be safe and not misguide the traffic.

Yet another example of smart affiliate marketing!

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