We made a handout for Affiliate Summit East 2010 that we thought would be good to share here too:

http://teamloxly.com/downloads/teamloxly2-ASE-flyer.pdf

This pdf lists all of the merchants we manage and has some special offers for some that you as an affiliate can post to your sites. Be sure to check the Shareasale Deals Database for all of our merchants to get the latest deals. Check out our Affiliate Support Forums for information and quick links for each of our programs.

Also, easy to remember reference about direct to merchant bidding: all of our current clients *except* Viator allow it with prior permission, that goes for Social media bidding in addition to pay per click advertising bidding.

None of our clients except Loxly Gallery and Our Handmade Gifts allow trademark or brand bidding.

For a wrap up of what happened at Affiliate Summit East in NYC read this series of posts by Vinny O’Hare.

We have a lot going on here at Team Loxly this summer. Come meet us at Affiliate Summit East in August in NYC. We have tables at the Meet Market on Sunday August 15th, 2010 for two Team Loxly Clients, Raven Tools and CorpNet Incorporation Services.

Raven Tools is table number 104 and CorpNet is table number 138.

Vinny and Debbie will both be at Affiliate Summit from Saturday until Wednesday, so if you aren’t able to find us at Meet Market, you can get in touch to set up a meeting. You can email us at affiliates@teamloxly.com or give us a call at 702-582-6742 and be sure to leave a message.

You can also reach us on Skype at:
Deborah: affiliateabcs
Vinny: nyfalcon1

I am puzzled by a question that has been raised frequently as of late: “In my store can I affiliate link to other products that I don’t carry?” The short answer is no. The longer answer is to actually ask a question back – “Why do you want to send the shoppers looking for your products away to someone else?”

If you are an ecommerce site (meaning you sell products using a shopping cart) and you have an affiliate program (meaning you pay affiliates to make sales of your products) you want to keep your traffic on your site purchasing from you. Many affiliates will not promote merchants that are featuring products not for sale on their own site. They don’t want to send you their traffic when you might receive compensation, but they definitely will not.

Aside from the affiliate aspect, there is the fact that you as a merchant want to look professional and trustworthy to the shoppers that find your site. If you have links that send your shoppers away, even if they were going to purchase your products and they were just curious and they clicked a link that took them away, they might never find their way back to you. Oops. Plus, it devalues your site and your product(s). Shoppers could get the uneasy feeling that you don’t believe in your product line if you are also selling other people’s products through outbound links.

While you may not have enough merchandise to sell, or you think people are looking for something you don’t have when they land on your site, the better way to handle that is to be sure that your site marketing efforts attract the right shoppers. Then once you have them, you make them feel that you are the only place they should be buying from. If you are selling blue widgets and people are landing on your site from searches for pink widgets, then you need to look at your site structure and content so that you are getting consumers who want to buy blue widgets.

It is the same for information products and sites selling services. If you can’t supply the service directly, have your visitors contact you about what they need, and then you can refer them privately after you have discussed their needs and determined you aren’t the right fit. Sites selling information products tend to cross promote, but again, you are sending your potential buyers off on a “maybe”. It’s much better for you to focus and sell them your own product instead.

You built an ecommerce site to make money by selling your own products. If you want to sell other people’s products, make a separate Web site.

Deborah Carney is an Outsourced Affiliate Program Manager and eCommerce Consultant (TeamLoxly.com) with a site dedicated to teaching affiliates and merchants (ABCsPlus.com) how to maximize their online earnings.

Originally published in FeedFront Magazine Issue 9.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here

The rush of Christmas is over, so now would be a good time to see what sold during the holiday season and dedicate a site to that topic. I normally use January as a time to focus on one brand-new site. You can go into your analytics programs and see what people were looking for and make a new niche Web site.

I like to make sites that are not just sites that sell products in the fourth quarter. Too many marketers focus on making a site just for Christmas. You should focus on a site that sells year around. It is also a good time to make that hobby site that you’ve wanted to make for a long time… you know that labor of love that you’ve always wanted to make.

Try to think of things that would sell throughout the year, such as team sports products. Every time you turn on a game all you see is people in the stands with jerseys on from their favorite team. Somebody has to sell them the jerseys it might as well be you. You can also think of all the sports that run the most during the year, my last site was based on NASCAR, since the season practically runs 10 months out of the year.

Kids are playing soccer all seasons, especially in the warm weather states. These kids need new cleats, shorts, balls, etc. You can also look towards your favorite hobby and develop a site around it. Hobbies are all year round also, you don’t take a break from your favorite hobby. Like I’ve said there are many ideas you can get just by looking at your analytics programs.

In addition to your analytics program, you should also look at Google trends, and take a look at the fourth-quarter searches. Odds are using these two tools will enable you to come up with a new site idea.

Some categories that are strong across the calendar year are home renovation, cooking, tools, automotive, and you can break each one of them down into a niche.

For home renovation you might just want to focus on bathrooms. Cooking can be anything from recipes to cooking utensils. Mechanics use tools all year round, and the automotive industry could be broken down in hundreds of ways, from tires to auto insurance.

Speaking of automotive, many people research new cars online before they go into a dealer. They could be doing this research on your site. Automotive manuals are always a big seller for people trying to repair that car.

Affiliate programs exist for almost every niche, and if you can’t find a good one, you can always turn to Google AdSense or some other contextual advertising program.

Vinny O’Hare is the founder of Vincent O’Hare Consulting, (VinnyOHare.com) an Internet marketing service that provides information on how to make money online with affiliate programs and contextual advertising.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

Here are the tentative schedules for Team Loxly, come find Deborah, Liz, or Vinny for VIP commissions, goodies and deals.

http://affiliatesummit.sched.org/loxly – Deborah
http://affiliatesummit.sched.org/vinnyohare – Vinny
http://affiliatesummit.sched.org/teamloxlyliz – Liz

Be sure to come to our MommyBloggers panel on Sunday Jan 16th at 1:30

We are announcing 2 new clients (maybe more) during the show and would love to talk to you!

Let’s get social!

The following deals have been added to the Shareasale Deals Database, and will be included in the special Black Friday database that Sarah is putting together. We will add to this as we get deals from the rest of our merchants.

For information on getting items to review from *some* of our merchants: Click Here

Merchant Name: Shop7
Offer: Buy 2 Items, Get 1 Free
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st

http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23148&m=17925&u=YourSASID

Join Shop7 and Our Handmade Gifts Affiliate Program

Merchant Name: Our Handmade Gifts
Offer: 35% off all orders
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st

http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23150&m=17925&u=YourSASID

Join Shop7 and Our Handmade Gifts Affiliate Program

Merchant Name: Loxly Gallery
Offer: 50% off all orders
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st

http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23151&m=12245&u=YourSASID

Join Loxly Gallery and Cool Butterflies Posters and Prints Affiliate Program

Merchant Name: Cool Butterflies
Offer: 50% off all orders
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st

http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23152&m=12245&u=YourSASID

Join Loxly Gallery and Cool Butterflies Posters and Prints Affiliate Program

Merchant Name: American Tea Room
Offer: 10% off all orders, including already on sale items
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23616&m=24685&u=YourSASID
Join American Tea Room Affiliate Program

Merchant Name: M-Rock Camera Bags
Offer: Take an additional 5% off our already low prices (including our 40% off clearance items!) on our top quality camera bags by shopping on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Coupon code is 5Disc and expires 12/1/2009.
Coupon Code: 5Disc
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23617&m=8611&u=YourSASID
Join M-Rock Camera Bags Affiliate Program

______________________________
The following deals are all with the *same* merchant, see below for details!

Merchant Name: Engravable Gifts 2 Go
Offer: 10% off every order over $50 – including sale items
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23628&m=17498&u=YourSASID

Merchant Name: The Baby Shower Gift Store
Offer: 10% off every order over $50 – including sale items
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23629&m=17498&u=YourSASID

Merchant Name: Engraved Crystal Shoppe
Offer: 10% off every order over $50 – including sale items
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23630&m=17498&u=YourSASID

Merchant Name: Custom Signs and Plaques
Offer: 10% off every order over $50 – including sale items
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23631&m=17498&u=YourSASID

Merchant Name: Custom Ceramic Stoneware
Offer: 10% off every order over $50 – including sale items
Coupon Code: BlackFriday
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Code: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23632&m=17498&u=YourSASID

Join The Mail Order Shoppe Affiliate Programs – all the above sites are in the *same* great affiliate program. One sign up and you join them all.

______________________________
Merchant Name: SWAK Designs Plus Sized Apparel
Coupon code: BF35
Offer: 35% off all regularly priced items
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Link: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23734&m=12469&u=YourSASID

Merchant Name: SWAK Designs Plus Sized Apparel
Coupon code: BFSALE25
Offer: 25% off already discounted sale and clearance items
Start and End Date: November 26 thru December 1st
Deal Link: http://www.shareasale.com/u.cfm?d=23735&m=12469&u=YourSASID

Join the SWAK Designs Plus Sized Apparel Affiliate Program by clicking here
Be sure to replace YourSASID with your ID number.

In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your host Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly) discusses email marketing with Aweber with Justin Premick, Director of Education Marketing at Aweber. This episode covers the basics and we took questions in advance which Justin got to answer. Part 2 gets into more advanced topics and more depth.

Here are some relevant notes, more in the next post!
AWeber’s Webinars

4-part series on getting more subscribers for your
blog newsletter:
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-subscribe-page.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-sharing.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-beyond-blog.htm

Follow us on Twitter:
@JustinPremick
@aweber
@loxly

Direct to merchant (DTM) pay per click (PPC) advertising is being restricted more and more, with major merchants like Amazon and EBay recently saying 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. Even though many affiliates made a lot of money using DTM PPC, the technique has flaws that smart affiliates should have recognized long ago.

First, affiliates have been paying for traffic and sending it off to direct to the merchant. So when the merchant pulls the plug, as many are now doing, they don’t have any residual traffic to a website of their own. The affiliates perfected the keywords and ads, but instead of sending traffic to the merchant, if they had been sending the traffic to their own website they would A. be able to continue without an issue and B. would have been building a site that had some authority and customer trust.

Next if the affiliate had their own landing pages, they could have been building a mailing list to use to contact people about similar or better products. Not a spam list, but a real list built from people that were interested in the product being promoted and possibly other similar products that can be featured on the same site. You can’t go back and change the past, but for the future look at this as an opportunity to do more for building a company brand.

Affiliates that are able to sell well through pay per click ads in the search engines have unique skills that many other people (not only affiliates, but merchants!) don’t have. Leveraging those skills to build traffic to their own websites and to build their own authority, credibility with shoppers, and email lists should take them to new levels that they weren’t aware they could achieve. If an affiliate isn’t good at building websites and landing pages, I recommend they partner with an affiliate that is good at that part, or go to sites such as elance and outsource the pieces they can’t do themselves. In the everchanging affiliate and online marketing landscape, the more you are able to utilize your skills and adapt to new requirements, the more successful you will be.

This was published in FeedFront Magazine Issue #7

Related Podcast

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.

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