Iowa City

Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

No longer is the focus on mass affiliation. Instead, the focus is on quality rather than quantity. Today, affiliate managers would rather focus on the active affiliates providing them with much more personalized service. These affiliate managers have to monitor and police affiliates to make sure they are in compliance with the company’s policies and procedures, are in compliance with spam policies and legislation, and are not doing anything to damage the merchant’s reputation.

Program management is another area that has changed quite dramatically. In the olden days, a merchant would provide access to banners through its extranet, and there was little communication between the merchant and the affiliates. Today program management is critical to the success of an affiliate marketing program. Merchants have a person or a team responsible for “feeding” the affiliates new material, new techniques, and new ideas to increase their business.

Today we have an increasing number of smart Internet marketers who are in it for the money. They are good at what they do, enjoy doing it, and are looking for great affiliate marketing programs with great products, a great compensation program, and great affiliate managers providing them with great tools and service to do what they do best.

Search advertising dates back almost as far as the search engines themselves. Way back in 1995, InfoSeek provided keyword banner advertising—you chose which keywords you were interested in, and when those words were searched
on, your banner ad appeared at the top of the search results page. In 1998, GoTo.com appeared. GoTo.com was the first to provide Internet marketers the opportunity to do text advertising on search engines. GoTo subsequently changed its name to Overture and Overture was bought by Yahoo!

Today Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are the main players in search advertising. Advertising with both of these will give you a reach of over 90 percent of the Internet search audience. Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords sell text-based keyword targeted ads through their own search engines as well as through a network of other search engines.

At the time this book was written, Yahoo! Search Marketing provided keyword targeted ads to Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, CNN, AlltheWeb, Sympatico.ca; ISPs Juno and NetZero; meta-search sites like Dogpile, Webcrawler, and Web Crawler; Microsoft Internet Explorer; and tons of content sites including Advertising.com, Coolsavings.com, ESPN, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, Knight Ridder, Consumer Review Network, and many more.Google provides targeted keyword ads to AOL, Lycos, AskJeeves, Netscape,Earthlink, CompuServe, Shopping.com, AT&T Worldnet, About.com, The New York Times, Business.com, HGTV, and other heavily trafficked sites.

The first advertisements on the World Wide Web began in 1994. These ads were always placed at the top of a Web page and were always 60 pixels high and 468 pixels wide and were known as banner ads. Whenever anyone thought about Internet marketing back in those early days, the first thing that came to mind was banner advertising. Back in those days, advertisers managed their own banner advertising campaigns and sites sold their own advertising space.

The second generation came along very quickly. Online advertising agencies started to crop up, managing the banner advertising space for very heavily trafficked sites. If you wanted to advertise on a specific site, you worked with their online agency. To advertise with a number of heavily trafficked sites, you ended up dealing with two or three or four advertising agencies.

Almost as soon as banner advertising became mainstream, it started to decline in effectiveness. Click-through rates dropped through the floor, technology to strip out unwanted ads became very popular, and soon there was all kinds of available advertising space at dirt prices and few takers. Banner advertising was okay for branding, but terrible on generating traffic to your site.