Daniel M. Clark

.#asw10

The 3pm session, Start Monetizing Your Blog Today is about to start, starring:

• Marty Fahncke, President, FawnKey & Associates (Twitter @FawnKey) (Moderator)
• Kristin Kinsey, President/CEO, MadHatter Consulting, Inc. (Twitter @KC)
• Tricia Meyer, Owner, Sunshine Rewards (Twitter @sunshinetricia)
• Carolyn Tang, Director of Client Services, ShareASale.com (Twitter @catango)

Each panelist represents some aspect of the customer purchase process in affiliate marketing. Carolyn is representing a network. Kristen is an Affiliate Manager. Tricia is an affiliate.

This session is Affiliate Marketing 101. When I walked in and said hello to the panel before they started, they asked me why I was here! Two reasons: first, I want to live blog one session in each time slot - no sitting out. Second, I want to support three of my favorite people in the industry; when it came to deciding which session to attend, none of the others were enough of a draw to overcome that.

Carolyn is starting off by talking about creative (banners, widgets, video) and Pay-Per-Call for use in offline advertising.

Tricia is continuing by describing what she does to monetize her Twilight site - AdSense, eBay, and generally pushing traffic to a pure commerce blog. This site doesn’t have a ton of repeat visitors or followers, but converts very well. Tricia is a fan of PopShops (and so am I). She’s also a fan of working with eBay (which I’m not), and GoldenCan (which I’ve never worked with).

Lastly, Kristen is giving us a breakdown of what affiliate managers and outsourced program managers (OPMs) do. Managers create all your link code as well as providing video, banners and widgets for the affiliates. Your affiliate manager will be responsible for accurate tracking of sales and working with the networks to make sure everything runs smoothly. Managers will also be able to identify hot trends and items that are converting particularly well.

The session is wrapping up with an “extreme blog makever”. The first site to go under the knife is Hot Dog Hockey. Kristen suggests mixing up the merchants so ads don’t get repeated. Tricia recommends not just going with big name merchants, think about smaller merchants. Carolyn recommends examining Pay-Per-Call integration. The second site is Sbenco.com. Tricia thinks that he should put some Affiliate Summit affiliate links (available through ShareASale). Carolyn really wants him to work in some video. Kristen recommends moving the AdSense off the top of the site.

Thanks for the session!