Nada Collar

I’ve just added a new blog to my Google Reader. Zac Johnson is a “Super affiliate” who has just started a blog about affiliate marketing. I enjoy Zac’s writing style as he often seems to slant towards a high level “running a business” article, as well as the usual affiliate news and ways to make money. I am a partner in a reasonably successful business in a completely unrelated field (but in technology) and I find that most high level business concepts carry over well, so its a nice mix for me.

My blog originally started as pure Revenue Sharing, but the more I look around and see concepts such as Zac’s Review Me and Make Money (taken from John Chow’s similar Link Love campaign), and his Top Commenters Competition, the more I realize that there are many, many types of revenue sharing. As I’ve mentioned before, even just removing rel=nofollow from your links is a form of revenue sharing.

Anyway, back to Zac’s blog. I am trying to learn as much as I can about the affiliate industry and so Zac’s site will stay on my RSS feed. Its well written and I am sure he will continue to write some great articles. Its good to get some fresh ideas if you have been reading from the same people over and over.

There has been a reasonable amount of noise lately about lead generation affiliates and their shady practises. Shoemoney published an article from an anonymous guest some time ago about how ValueClick seemed to be in some shady practises. They (Shoemoney wrote that he had done some due diligence and seemed to agree with the guest) seemed to be directly involved in the “Win a free iPod” deals.

I did some digging and discovered that the websites in question were run by the old 180Solutions team. Now it seems that analysts are questioning the state of the industry and what effect these kinds of deals are going to have on these companies.

We have already seen the Florida Attorney General take action against ringtone scammers. But I predict class action suites. There must be a lot of people who have been scammed by free ringtones, free iPods and other shady deals. And there must be a lot of Lawyers itching to make a fortune off them.

Start developing your sites explaining these shady deals and class action lawsuits. I suspect they will make create adsense or affiliate pages to get leads for the lawyers Ironic isn’t it.

Tumri Cornerstore launched some time at the beginning of this January. But there hasn’t been much information about it around the place. Perhaps the most information is over at 5 Star Affiliate Programs, especially in the forum there.

The idea of Tumri is similar to MyPickList and FavoriteThingz, although from an initial look it appears to be implemented better than those two. It also seems that Tumri is marketing itself towards publishers rather than social network users, so that might help them.

Apparently for users that signed up in January receive 70% revenue share, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is now.

User Experience

One thing I found interesting was that on signing up I had to select my target audience based on gender, education level and average household income. I guess this will help target the widget, but I would have thought that this information would be better to be added when the widget is created. It would seem that I can only have one widget per account, which is not perfect if this is being targeted towards publishers who likely have multiple places (with different targets) they would like to use this widget.

On signing up the site seemed to hang, but I got an email and was able to access my account, so just some small hiccup. On signup there was also mention of a conditions for a “widget sweepstakes”, but the link didn’t seem to have anything related, apart from a small box stating that every 100th signup would give me a free iPod shuffle. I assume a signup is a new publisher (found from my widget) who creates a widget, but who knows.

Once inside the publisher portal Tumri has a very clean looking user interface and creating a widget is fairly simple, however I found that I could not target my widget any closer than a category, unlike the write-up which said I could “select or block CornerStore offers by item, brand, keywords, product category, price break, location, and many other criteria”.

Conclusion

Overall it looks like a product that could be useful with some more work. But given the apparent success of MyPickList and FavoriteThingz they are going to have to work hard.

What does it need? Firstly a blog to inform people of updates (there is a news page on the publishers section which kind of resembles a blog), secondly some decent help (any help at all would be good), and finally and most importantly the ability to actually target certain products like they promised.

View my widget here.

I have just read an article on TechCrunch about online booking companies. These are companies that are trying to be more than just online table booker’s (like OpenTable). They are aiming to provide a service for the many types of business out there that require bookings.

Anyway, it got me to thinking. What benefits could restaurants (and other businesses, buts lets just say restaurants for now) get from online booking. The obvious is more bookings, but I thought, well they only have so many tables (or employee’s since all service businesses are constrained by employee’s). So why would they want to pay money to get reservations when they already get them for “free” over the phone?

Then it occurred to me, imagine if you could be an affiliate for a restaurant. Suddenly it could be well worth the effort of some personality to recommend a restaurant. Suddenly a restaurant could be booked 2 weeks, 2 months in advance. That means suddenly you could charge twice as much for a meal, attract the type of people that spend more on everything. Profits could double, triple, quadruple. Well you get the idea.