Affiliate Ideas

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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

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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

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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

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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.