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!

Shop7.com - Visit Site
Request Merchandise
Join Affiliate Program
Shop7 is looking for those that are interested in reviewing and/or doing giveaways of our handmade jewelry pieces. All items at Shop7 are $7 everyday! This is great for those of you that have bargain related blogs. Please fill out our form and we will be in touch shortly!

Loxly Gallery - Visit Site
Request Merchandise
Join Affiliate Program
Loxly Gallery is looking for those that are interested in reviewing and/or doing giveaways of prints and posters of independant photographers and artists. This is great for those of you that have blogs that are family oriented, especially if you have a home decor section. Please fill out our form and we will be in touch shortly! In addition to Loxly Gallery, we have other niche sites you can request prints from:
Cool Butterflies
Roses and Lilacs
Cool New York City Posters and Gifts

American Tea Room - Visit Site
Request Merchandise
Join Affiliate Program
American Tea Room, Your Ultimate Tea Resource, is looking for select bloggers to review their gourmet loose tea. We are specifically looking for blogs with high traffic that are family oriented with food sections or health sections. If you are interested, please click here to fill out the form.

If you want to know more about affiliate marketing and how it can help you monetize your blog, please email me at dc at teamloxly.com and also visit Affiliate ABCs for podcasts and other information on making money with affiliate marketing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Web sites need images to break up the text and show your visitors things you want them to see. Taking photos that you specifically want to use on a Web site is different than taking family photos or photos for print production.

First, they don’t have to be huge in size. You simply want an image that is big enough to show what you need, clear and properly exposed. Let’s take this step by step.

Good camera
It doesn’t have to be a DSLR to get good images to use on your Web site. You can use a small camera or even the camera in your phone, as long as it has good optics and exposure settings. The largest size image you want to show on a Web site is about 500×500 pixels, which is very small by today’s camera standards.
But you want that image to be super sharp. If your phone takes blurry underexposed pictures, don’t use it. Most digital cameras are fine for general photography.

If you need to take close ups of products, you will need a better camera, one with a “macro” mode that will let you get close to your subject. Be careful, though, with close up shots that you don’t use a lens that makes the subject distorted (fisheye effect).

And remember that since you don’t need large files you can crop to make the subject bigger.

Hold it Steady
Hold your camera steady when you are taking pictures that you are going to use online. If it is in the evening or at night and you don’t want to use a flash (like night shots in a city for a travel site) lean the camera on a light pole or a mailbox.

Anything that you can set the camera on that won’t move can be used as a makeshift tripod. Even if you have a tripod, some cities and parks don’t allow them to be used in certain areas without a permit.

Good Exposure
For daytime pictures, shooting outdoors in sunlight is usually fine, but avoid shooting directly into the sun. Indoors you want to use a flash to avoid images that are dark or have a yellow overtone to them.

Crop it
Use a photo editing software (most computers come with them now, and there are plenty of free ones) to crop your images and resize them.

The image that comes straight from the camera is WAY too big to use on your Web site. Don’t use the resize tags in your HTML code to make the file fit. Doing that uses valuable bandwidth and slows your page load time.

Open the picture in your editing software and use the crop function to eliminate extra space around your subject. Next resize the image so that it is 500 pixels on its longest edge. Then use File, Save As to save the modified version of your image.

Hopefully these tips will help you take pictures that will spice up your Web site and make a good impression on your site visitors.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 5 here

Listen along and get some tips on the fun and historic places to go and see while you are here.

Follow @VinnyOHare and @loxly (Debbie) on Twitter and hit them up with questions about what to see and where to eat either ahead of time or during the show.

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

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