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Posts Tagged ‘Marketers’

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.

“Rich media” is a term used to describe a wide variety of media experiences that offer an enhanced interactive experience. Rich media would include things like streaming audio, streaming video, applets that allow user interaction,
and special effects. There are a number of programming technologies that are used to deliver this rich media functionality, and these are continually releasing new features and bells and whistles in keeping with the explosive growth of this medium.

DHTML, Java, Javascript, and Flash would be among the most popular rich media programming technologies. Rich media is appealing to advertisers for a number of reasons. Brand recognition and message association can be achieved very effectively by using audio, video, and animation. Marketing content can be embedded in entertaining content and educational content for those consumers who don’t want advertising; hence, the significant growth in “advertainment” and “edutainment.”

Marketers totally understand that consumers want to be in control and they do not want to be marketed to. Marketers understand that marketing should be so appealing that consumers want it and invite it into their lives and devices. Nielsen/NetRatings AdRelevance reports that rich media has risen steadily and significantly over the last five years. The rich media advertising is certainly more appealing to the consumer—more entertaining, more informative, more relevant, and more timely.