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Team News

Trademark Poachers Beware – Sales Reversed in Several Team Loxly Clients

by loxly on August 21, 2009

I have been finding trademark poachers in several of the Team Loxly managed merchants, and our team is vigilant on monitoring TM and Brand bidding. Apparently one or two have slipped through by deceptive practices, so their commissions are being reversed throughout the day today. These reversals will show in the Viator, M-Rock and Mail Order Shoppe Shareasale statistics. The violators have been removed from those programs. If you are unsure what the policies are for any merchant you promote, please check the links within Shareasale where the PPC restrictions are posted. All of our merchants have very clear policies.

Many of you have helped through the years by emailing me or PMing me information on trademark poachers, which I have always appreciated. I thank each of you for alerting me to the fact that there have been some affiliates that slipped by me. Team Loxly has people working on the program literally around the world (New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Australia) we will be stepping up our efforts to catch and find affiliates that break the rules. We have enough “clean” affiliates that we want to protect them and their income from our program.

You can send us an anonymous message about potential TM poachers or others that are breaking the rules buy leaving a comment on this post or if you don’t need to be anonymous, send and email to any one of us. If you leave a comment, it will not be made public, only the admins here at our blog will see it.

August Viator Affiliate Newsletter

by loxly on August 21, 2009

Thanks to all of you we are having a *great* travel season. I’m impressed that in a downturned economy the affiliate program is still rocking. A few quick notes and then let you get back to your summer fun! And Congratulations to all of you for getting Viator in the Shareasale Top 15!

Datafeed Updated
The monthly Datafeed update has been done, please check to see if the tours you are featuring have been discontinued or if there are new ones for the destination you focus on. Here is the direct link to the Viator affiliate datafeed, be sure to log into Shareasale first.

Deals Database
Instead of coupons we have been focusing on providing deals through the Shareasale deals database, where you can download a file of all of the tours that have short term deals. These deals convert *very* well. The tours in the Deals database are *not* included in the regular database because they have defined end dates and most are short term. The dates are clearly included to help you manage keeping fresh and current deals available.

Coupon Reminder
If you have outdated or customer submitted coupons on your website you need to remove them. Use links from the Deals Database to populate your coupon or specials pages. No, we aren’t handing out coupons (stopped you before you asked! :) ) but some sites have coupons posted that they shouldn’t have. This causes customer service issues for both you AND us.

DTM PPC Bidding
If you are asking yourself “What’s that?” you probably aren’t doing it :) However, if you are marketing Viator via paid advertising in the search engines (PPC) you need to be sure to read the Viator PPC guidelines.

In no case are you allowed to link from a paid search ad directly to Viator. You need to link to a page on your website that has Viator links on it. You are not allowed to make your ad look like you are the official Viator website.

To keep abreast of the latest Viator news be sure to visit our dedicated Affiliate Forum and Support Website.

And click here for podcasts and information to help you run your business even better.

As always, if you need anything, contact any of you Viator affiliate team:
Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare and Liz Ababon

Affiliate ABCs #14 How Affiliates Can Utilize Blogger Link Up

by loxly on July 13, 2009

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

Who Owns Your Content?

by loxly on July 3, 2009

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

Here We Grow Again… New Affiliate Manager Joins Team Loxly

by loxly on June 19, 2009

You already know him and (hopefully) respect him, Vinny O’Hare aka NYFalcon is going to be joining Team Loxly as our newest affiliate manager. We have some exciting programs coming up, one that we will be announcing tomorrow, that Vinny will stepping in to manage.

His skills will enable us to reach into areas previously untapped and he will be instrumental in moving us into new areas of recruiting and managing.

Join me in giving him a warm welcome to the Team

Contact vinny at:
vinny at teamloxly.com
Twitter: @nyfalcon

Affiliate ABCs #9 – Who Owns Your Content?

by loxly on April 8, 2009

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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/Vinny O’Hare

And the Twitter account mentioned in the podcast: AwesomeWreckage – now Awesome Race Fans

Team Loxly at Affiliate Summit West

by loxly on January 1, 2009

Are you attending Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas January 10-13, 2009? If you are and you want to talk to us here at Team Loxly about our programs or about consulting, or about being an artist on Loxly Gallery, send us an email (loxly at teamloxly.com) or visit our thread at ABestWeb and we can set up a time. Las Vegas is a beautiful place for a convention and Affiliate Summit is the place to be if you are interested at all in Affiliate Marketing.

Hope to see you there!

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