Whether you’ve just launched an affiliate program, or you’re experienced in the field and are looking to increase your sales, attracting the right kind of affiliates is a must to ensure a successful Q4.  The following checklist highlights recruitment strategies that merchants can apply to ensure they are bringing in the right affiliates into their program.

1. Brand Exposure
Merchants love affiliate marketing for its performance-based  revenue model, but affiliates are savvier than ever before and know that their customers won’t buy brands that aren’t well known and trusted. You need to increase brand exposure every place possible, online and offline. For example, a merchant that wants Canadian traffic needs to launch on and offline ad campaigns north of the border, or it will be hard for any affiliate to give prime real estate space on their site to promote a brand their customers don’t recognize.

2. Customer Promotions
Coupon codes, free shipping and other deals make a major impact on whether or not a customer will buy a product/service.  Affiliates flock to offers that are unique, exclusive and convenient—so if you can, introduce these marketing incentives, then make sure they are clearly visible when marketing your affiliate program to new partners!

3. Get Social
Technorati, Google Alerts, Facebook and Twitter are all great channels for attracting new partners who promote products/services that may be similar to your own. Use keywords related to product/service in Google Alerts and Technorati to find blogs that are good match for your own program.  And keep in mind that Google and Microsoft both recently secured deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Facebook to include updates into Bing search results.  This makes social media marketing all the more important to marketing in general, and specifically to search engine marketing.

4. Performance Bonuses
Performance bonuses are excellent incentives to attract new partners, or even to complement an existing affiliate’s performance campaign. Merchants can either offer a set dollar amount or a tiered bonus commission that is based on sales. Try tailoring your bonus system according to your budget, and if you so choose, only offer these incentives to affiliates who’ve performed well in the past.

5. Referral Commission
Many affiliates get into the business of affiliate marketing because of friends who are also affiliates. Encourage this word of mouth marketing through referral commissions. Many affiliates may hear of affiliate programs through forums and search engines, but word of mouth is just as influential. Offer a flat referral commission and if you can afford it, a lifetime commission on transactions the referred affiliate sends.
If you’re already active with all or some of the above recruitment strategies make sure your affiliates and potential affiliates know about them.  Announce these details in your company newsletters, on your blogs, on your website and even in industry print publications.  The more affiliates know of these details, the more likely you are to attract quality affiliates to your program.  And if you’re not yet active with these recruitment strategies, Q4 is the perfect time to get started!

For more techniques, tools, tips and great resources to make sure you’re getting every last drop out of your affiliate marketing campaigns, be sure to come back to the Share Results blog. Until November 27, Share Results is throwing a big Holiday Blogging Event, packed with all kinds of seasonal information regarding trends for Q4, tips to get the best deals, consumer trends and how best optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Are you active with social media marketing? A recent announcement by Google and Microsoft now makes social media marketing all the more important to marketing in general, and specifically search engine marketing.

Google and Microsoft have both secured deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Facebook to include updates into Bing search results. For now, Google will be focusing solely on including tweets in their search results, but rumor has it they will be looking into Facebook soon.

This announcement bodes well for marketers who are active with these two social media venues, meaning more opportunity to be found in real-time searches.

Both Google and Microsoft are still working out just how these results will be included among their other conventional search results. Bing is working on a beta tool for people to try out, while Google has now gone live with the Google Social Search service.

Bing features a “Best Match” option, which prioritizes certain tweets over others. Bing has stated that credence will be given to Tweeters that have the most followers. Google Social Search, meanwhile, is designed to return traditional results along with updates and tweets that users’ friends and other contacts they follow on various social networks have posted.

Are you active with social media? If so, how are you using it, and has it been successful? If you haven’t tried your hand at Facebook or Twitter, will this recent announcement by Google and Microsoft change your mind? We want to know!

Major retailers are re-evaluating their marketing strategies, with more and more opting to invest in Internet search ads, as this medium becomes mainstream. Indeed, Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, predicts a ‘double-digit’ increase in search ad spending this quarter, most notably from retail advertisers during the peak holiday online shopping season.

As this marketing medium becomes more popular, marketers are also becoming savvier. As a Wall Street Journal article reports, some of the new strategies include buying top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are in the final stages of making a purchase decision. Being aware of how consumers search when they are ready to purchase, is critical to making your ROI as lucrative as possible.

With Halloween fast approaching, a good example of this might be using long-tail keywords like “buy a Spiderman Halloween costume” versus a more general search term like, “Halloween costume”. A consumer would be far more likely to use a long-tail keyword like the Spiderman example above when they are further down the sales channel, and are ready to buy.

When you do incorporate long-tail keywords in your search ads, make sure the landing page where you are sending the consumer truly matches their interest. Using the same Spiderman costume example, it would be wise to send the consumer to targeted page on your website. In this case, unless the landing page had a selection of Spiderman Halloween costumes, chances are that your ROI on this search ad would be less than attractive.

If you haven’t tried your hand in search ads, the holiday season is probably the best time of the year to give it a shot. Whether you choose to go with Google, or with Bing which increased its share of searches and search-ad dollars in Q3 (Source: PaidContent.org), Share Results is now offering its SEM services (contact Jamie [at] shareresults [dot] com), with a team of search engine experts, to get you going with what is now recognized as a very popular, and very savvy way of marketing.

It’s week two of our Holiday Blogging Event, and in our last blog of the week, we ask, what one incentive do online consumers want more than anything else?

According to Forrester Research, 75% of customers prefer to shop with an online retailer that offers this incentive, and The Conference Board Survey supports these same findings, reporting that 90% of consumers say this would also entice them to spend even more online.

The incentive here is free shipping. It’s an attractive enticement, and most consumers have come to expect it, especially around the peak holiday season.

Many merchants debate whether offering free shipping or a discounted purchase price will be more attractive to the consumer. David Bell, marketing professor at the Wharton School observes that

For whatever reason, a free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10.

Bell also concludes that 60% of online retailers cite “free shipping with conditions” as their most successful marketing tool.

So why is a free shipping offer so important to an online retailer?

• 78% of online customers say that exorbitant shipping costs discourage them from online purchases. (Source: E-tailing Group, 2008)
• 75% of people prefer to shop with online retailers that offer free shipping, compared to 61% in 2007. (Source: Forrester Research, 2008)
• 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges. (Source: Paypal, comScore, 2008)
• 61 of the largest 100 online retailers offered free shipping as of the week of Monday, November 10, 2008. (Source: Internet Retailer)
• 90% of respondents say free shipping offers would entice them to spend more online. (Source: The Conference Board Survey, 2008)
• 72% of consumers say that if an e-commerce site eliminated free shipping, they would use another e-commerce site that did offer free shipping. (Source: comScore Survey, 2008)
• People are searching for ‘free shipping’ earlier in the Christmas shopping season, and for longer. Searches for free shipping began to rise in October of last year, and actually peaked in the first week of January. (source: eConsultancy.com, 2009)

Need more reasons to offer free shipping this holiday season? Check out Free Shipping.org for a list of retailers who are incorporating this incentive into their marketing strategy—and succeeding!

Is your affiliate marketing campaign ready for the holiday season? If not, this is the blogging event to get you ready for the busiest season of the year. Check out last week’s blogs, and make sure to tune in again next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for more tips and techniques to help you end Q4 with your most successful campaign yet!

Share Results is excited to announce that we now have three employees who have received Google Analytics accreditation. This means that businesses can work with Share Results to maximize SEM efforts and set up analytics campaigns- as well as growing a company’s business through Google and other search marketing opportunities.

The Analytics accreditation is proof of proficiency in using Google Analytics, and qualification remains current for 18 months. In order to receive the accreditation, individuals must complete the mandated Google training sessions and score 75% or higher in the Analytics exam. Receiving the Google Analytics accreditation means that Share Results is now qualified to set up Google Analytics for client websites, offer in depth analysis of statistics and set up conversion tracking and goals on client websites.

If you’re seeking out opportunities for branding and acquisition though paid search, contact Share Results to develop an online strategy.

If PPC is part of your affiliate marketing campaigns, (and it should be!) then the Affiliate Custom ID (ACID) Tool is a great feature of the Share Results software that you should become familiar with.

What is the ACID Tool?
The ACID Tool is a Share Results software feature that allows you to add a custom parameter to your links to enable more detailed tracking at the transaction level, and to track the traffic that you are generating directly to a merchant’s website.

What is the Benefit of Using the ACID Tool?
The great thing about using the ACID Tool is that you will be able to instantly identify which keywords are working for you. This information will allow you to tweak your future PPC campaigns, ensuring that you are getting the greatest return on your investment.

Where Do I Access the ACID Tool?
To access the ACID tracking, (1) go to the Share Results Banner Manager, (2) select your campaign, (3) select your creative and (4) add a unique identifier in the addACID text box and click on update.

How Do I Implement the ACID Tool?
Implementing the ACID requires that the additional parameter and value be added at the end of the standard affiliate link.

1) When you create your ACID link in Share Results, it will look like this:
http://www.shareresults.com/t/url.php/cid/[cid]/sid/[sid]/acid/[ACIDtracking]

[cid] = is the banner id generated automatically by Share Results
[sid] = is the site ID supplied by Share Results that identifies the affiliate
[acid] = can be your keyword or an alphanumeric value supplied by the affiliate

2) For the tracking to be PPC compliant, you need to modify the tracking to the following:
http://www.shareresults.com/t/url.php?cid=[cid]&sid=[sid]&acid=[ACIDtracking]
And note, when you are tweaking your tracking (in point 2 above), that you are adding “?”, “=” and “&”. This will ensure that your tracking is PPC compliant.

I Have my Affiliate Custom ID, Now What?
Once you’ve created your ACID, you need to add this URL to the destination URL in your PPC campaign. The keyword that generated the sale will now show up in the Transaction Report of Share Results. To view the ACID, look at your Affiliate CID column, shown below.

Are you getting ready for Q4… and the upcoming holiday season? It’s the perfect opportunity to start using the ACID tool. Log into your Share Results account and get set up with the ACID Tool by implementing this tracking to your PPC campaigns today! Have questions, need assistance getting started? Contact jamie at shareresults.com—he’d be pleased to help!

Slowly but surely, Bing is building more bang.

For the third month in a row, Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing gained a slight increase in the U.S. search market. Accounting for 9.3% of U.S web searches for the month of August, a .4% increase from its July share of 8.9%, Bing continues to gain market share from its giant competitor, Google.

Similar data indicates that Google remained the leader of the U.S. search and advertising market with a 64.6% market share in August; this down 0.1% from July. Yahoo also dipped from a 20.1% market share to 19.3%.

While comScore reports on Bing’s rising popularity, it still finds that most Google users are still turning to old-faithful. That being said, Bing’s steady rise does present an attractive opportunity to affiliates who might be ready to try their optimization hand with another search engine, which for the time being remains less popular, but perhaps less competitive as well.

Here is what our experts recommend for affiliates that want to experiment with Bing to get more traffic:

1. Experiment with PPC on this engine to test the ‘keyword waters’. How does your keyword performance compare with your current Google campaign or past campaigns you have run?

2. If you own multiple sites you might want to create a site specifically optimized for Bing – remember that this may take some time to determine its success, so be prepared to invest 6-12 months on this project.

3. Set-up your additional affiliate marketing ID’s in your affiliate account to track traffic results and conversions. In Share Results you can create additional site profiles and track performance of specific key words using the ACID ID Tool. Speak to your affiliate manager to learn how you can set this up today!

4. Set-up monitor tools to monitor site performance with your favorite third part analytics account.

Here are some recommendations for merchants wanting to build their business with Bing:

1. Suggestions 1 & 4 that that we made for affiliates above, are equally important for merchants, plus:

2. Make sure your affiliate program is set up to support Bing. Have creatives such as text links featuring products that you think would work well with Bing (for example, your target consumers who would be using Bing), and clear policies about PPC.

By all reports, Bing is doing well—very well. Its user friendly and attractive design and useful way of sifting through information is, if nothing else, turning heads. Who knows if those heads will stay permanently glued to Bing, but the potential is definitely there.

Are you on board with Bing? We want to know!

The Bing search engine was launched by Microsoft in June 2009 and was followed in July by a search tie-up with rival Yahoo .

There is an ongoing debate pertaining to affiliate links and whether or not it is advisable to cloak (hide) them or show them.

On one hand, people are less inclined to click on affiliate links, as they tend to trust long links with many characters and unknown codes. For the affiliate, it helps prevent others from stealing affiliate earnings from them, while also improving SEO results rankings.

On the other hand, many affiliates have achieved consistently strong commissions from shoppers who trust them. This is because they show their affiliate links and thus demonstrate a “nothing to hide” attitude. Although this may be true for several affiliates, the overall consensus is to hide affiliate links to improve the click-through rate, while maintaining strong SEO rankings and clean links. The featured blogs in the BAMroll this week focus on the aforementioned debate.

Webmasters Central Blog looks at both sides of the debate and presents some clear explanations for how to cloak affiliate links should an affiliate decide upon this course of action.

Tech-Link blog discusses why it is important to cloak affiliate links and the potential dangers of showing them.

See you next week!

Looking for that cool new digital camera? Searching high and low for the latest and trendiest handbag? Bing has launched a new visual search engine that displays all results…visually! By using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, Bing has been able to create a sleek, time-saving way of comparison shopping and searching. Technology in general has emphasized the visual appeal (see iphone), so this development certainly makes sense from a consumer’s point of view. The integration of the visual aspect to search results creates a powerful combo that is sure to attract many users to the search engine.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then Bing is on the way towards something significant in search engine history. This week’s BAMroll focuses on two blogs that have expressed their opinions on the matter. Read on to find out more!

Battellemedia’s blog post ‘Bing Gets Visual’ highlights the aspects of Bing’s new search engine addition. Written by John Battelle, the blog focuses on search engine news and thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more.

SearchEngineLand’s blog is a news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry. Led by journalist Danny Sullivan, who has been covering search for the past 11 years, it is published by Third Door Media, which also produces the Search Marketing Expo conference series and the Search Marketing Now webcast events.

Affiliate marketers should be aware of this development, as visual results could provide new methods of recruiting high-potential affiliates.

A successful affiliate needs the right tools and resources to maximize conversions, and create and maintain a successful online presence. Part of this equation also includes staying in-the-know about important industry information, and keeping abreast with current search news, as this provides the affiliate with further opportunity to target additional market segments.

So when Microsoft and Yahoo! reached a deal whereby Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power Yahoo search, it got our attention. As you know, getting ranked in search engines takes time. Whether that transition period takes an affiliate 6 months, 12 months or longer, it can be a definite advantage to start optimizing now, to ensure you get found later.

There is still so much up in the air, like when exactly this will go live, but here’s what we know for sure.

What We Know for Sure
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo’s core search technologies.
• Bing will become the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo sites.
• Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
• Microsoft’s AdCenter platform will fulfill self-serve advertising for both companies, and AdCenter will set prices for all search ads.
• The deal is estimated to be worth an extra $500 million in annual operating income and $200 million in capital expenditure savings to Yahoo.

What Yahoo Says
“This deal will make the difference between a great Yahoo! search experience and an awesome one!” Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz. In an interview with CNBC, Bartz talks about the aspects of Yahoo’s strategy, and its value to consumers, advertisers and publishers.

What Microsoft Says
“This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.” Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer.

What this Means for Affiliate Marketing
It’s far too early to draw any conclusions, but we think at the very least that affiliates should start optimizing for both Bing AND Google, and that Bing certainly has the potential of becoming a strong competitor. Especially since Yahoo will be powered by it in the upcoming future.

What We Like About Bing
What is interesting about Bing’s platform is that it focuses on making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. This kind of platform is great for affiliates, who are often involved in helping consumers make decisions about which products and services they should buy.

And so far the feedback on Bing is pretty positive. It’s still too early to say whether people will make a permanent switch away from Google, but either way, we think the online playing field is changing, and affiliates best optimize now, and Bing later.

What are your thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal? Will this affect the way you conduct your affiliate marketing?