“Stump the Experts” Panel
Pick your poison: Affiliate marketing, paid search marketing, eMail, landing page testing & optimization, SEO — you name it, we’ve got the expert advice and answers. You just supply the questions. Bring us your most difficult questions and quandaries — try to stump the experts! NO question will go un-answered (time permitting of course). This could be the most useful meet-up of the year, y’all!

Our Panel of Experts:
Conversion & Experience Architecture: Bryan Eisenberg
Paid Search Strategies: George Mitchie of Rimm-Kaufman Group
Search Optimization: Stephan Spencer, NetConcepts
eMail: Jason Oats of Datran Media
Affiliate Marketing: Yours truly, Jeff Molander

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT
REGISTER TODAY! SPACE IS LIMITED!

TO REGISTER: The Paying for Performance Webinar is brought to you monthly by Vintage Tub and Bath’s Allan Dick, GoToWebinar and Jeff Molander. Please note, this is a “retailer only” event with an open door policy to others. Please contact Jeff Molander (jeff-at-jeffmolander.com) or Allan (allan-at-vintagetub.com) to request participation in consideration of quality content you might present to our group.

Move over MarketingSherpa because here comes MarketMotive and HowCast. Come and discover (and critique!) new educational resources for Web marketers ranging from certification programs to Webinars and ‘dirt world’ conferences that offer top notch educational opportunities. Guest discussants will reveal their recent experiences (good and bad), candid viewpoints and “take-away learnings” from the best content producers out there. YOU will also be asked to rank YOUR experiences at popular Web marketing conferences in real time. How will our group rate them? Come and find out!

Don’t fret over not being able to attend all the conferences or spend on educational materials — our group separates the wheat from the chaff so you don’t have to!

Joining in the discussion:
Rachel Honoway of AffiliateClassroom.com
John Marshall of MarketMotive.com
Lee Gientke of Leadpoint.com (a conference addict)
Danny Sullivan of SMX / Third Door Media

PLEASE NOTE:
Slight format change, gang. We’re going to mix it up by featuring a “Special SURPRISE Guest slot” during the last 15 minutes of the program. Each guest will be covering a topic of interest to our group in a way that gives you ACTIONABLE recommendations that can be applied to your business immediately.

Date: Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Time: 4:00 PM ET, 1 pm PT

REGISTER TODAY! SPACE IS LIMITED!

To do so contact me!

All the Best,
Jeff Molander (and Vintage Tub & Bath’s Allan Dick)

The Paying for Performance Webinar is brought to you monthly by Vintage Tub and Bath’s Allan Dick, GoToWebinar and Jeff Molander. Please note, this is a “retailer only” event with an open door policy to others. Please contact Jeff or Allan (allan at vintagetub.com) to request participation in consideration of quality content you might present to our group.

Joining in the discussion:
Donald Schamber, Online Marketing Manager, Vistaprint.com
Carolyn Tang, Client Services Dir, Shareasale
Jonathan Miller, Founder, Forge Business
Jamie Birch, Dir, Affiliate Marketing, Converseon
Chris Sanderson, Founder & GM, AMWSO

Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM ET

REGISTER TODAY! SPACE IS LIMITED!

To do so contact me!

All the Best,
Jeff Molander (and Vintage Tub & Bath’s Allan Dick)

The Paying for Performance Webinar is brought to you monthly by Vintage Tub and Bath’s Allan Dick, GoToWebinar and Jeff Molander. Please note, this is a “retailer only” event with an open door policy to others. Please contact Jeff or Allan (allan at vintagetub.com) to request participation in consideration of quality content you might present to our group.

Well why not?

When I got to reading the commission terms and “Search and General Promotion Rules” I saw the following amature and generally onerous paragraph (emphasis mine):

Search and General Promotion Rules:
* Search Policy – Bidding on Angie’s List trademarks or use of our trademark in domain names is prohibited, unless you have approval in writing from Angie’s List. To protect profit margins, your PPC Search listings must not rank into a higher PPC Search placement than the in-house listing with the display URL of www.angieslist.com. You may apply to be a part of our special group for search by contacting angiesaffiliates@gmail.com.
* General Promotion – Compensation for promoting Angie’s List is only available to publishers delivering US traffic who are not listed within Angie’s List.

Affiliates have been leveraging paid search for many years and along come merchants (like Angie’s List) who finally figure out how affiliates work and write onerous terms like that. I really wouldn’t have a problem with it if the bold sentence if it didn’t begin with “To protect profit margins”. Now why doesn’t the affiliate manager of Angie’s List simply write “we don’t want affiliates who use paid search because our margins are thin and we are afraid to get beat by our affiliates”?

What’s the lesson here? Well there are a number but here are three:

1.  Learn how Google works before writing antiquated rules like the above. The basic paid search equation for Google is CTR * Bid= ad placement. If  you ad sucks, Google will make sure they place an ad that pays them more money above yours. So Angie, it doesn’t matter what an affiliate bids. They could be bidding a penny but still have a better paid placement than you because your click though rate is poor.
2. Do the math before you write stupid stuff like the above. Writing stuff like that tells me and potential affiliates that you have little experience working with affiliates. Like I said above, affiliates have been doing this paid search thing for a long time and more times than not, they will have more experience with paid search than you do (or can afford). Think about your ROAS and don’t forget to include salaries and benefits for your SEM manager. Compare that to a decent affiliate manager or OPM and see what you get. The numbers won’t lie but it will help you make a rational decision before you give your affiliate program  a bad reputation.
3. Never, never forget your current or future affiliates aren’t the enemy. They should be viewed as partners — an outsourced sales staff. They can make your business if you help them and avoid saying things like the above. Never forget affiliates are bottom line, ROI focused folks. If you create a program that prevents them from achieving their ROI expectations, they’ll drop your program like a bad habit.