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There is a lot of talk about Affiliate 2.0 and harnessing technology to grow affiliate businesses, but how can you really do it?

Video is showing lots of potential, and mobile phone marketing has an exciting future, but both have associated learning curves and other barriers to entry.

How about t-shirts? Doesn’t sound so glorious, right? Well maybe that’s because you haven’t heard of Reactee.

Reactee is a company that enables you to create a t-shirt with a call to action to send a text message to get more information about a given subject.

When people text a word of your choosing, they get an auto-response to their phone of up to 120 characters from you.

For instance, you could create a shirt with the name of your favorite band, wear it to a concert for them, and have your affiliate link in the text response to sell their ringtones or something.

Reactee provides you with a log of all of the SMS requests, messages posted by people to your account, and more. Give it a try.

Sponsor the videos from educational sessions at Affiliate Summit 2007 East.

There is an auction on eBay running through July 5, 2007 to sponsor the Affiliate Summit educational session videos.

Your company logo will be featured for three seconds before and after each educational session video from Affiliate Summit 2007 East. Videos will be made available to the general public.

All proceeds go to the March of Dimes.

This sponsorship requires a high resolution logo from the sponsor prior to the conclusion of the show in Miami. Specifications: 600 dpi (dots per inch) preferred, 300 dpi acceptable; 1280×1024 minimum resolution; .TIF(preferred), .GIF, or .JPG file types. We need the capability of zooming in 800% on the logo without any real loss of resolution. All of this will ensure that the logo will look it’s best on the video.

Premature birth affects more than half a million babies in the U.S. every year. It’s the #1 cause of newborn death, and babies who survive may suffer lifelong consequences, such as cerebral palsy, mental retardation, chronic lung disease, and vision and hearing loss. The March of Dimes, a nonprofit health organization that works to prevent premature birth and other serious threats to infant help, can really make a difference in an unborn baby’s life.

Affiliate Summit believes that the March of Dimes is a great choice for the Affiliate Marketing industry’s charitable efforts.

Bid now to brand your company and save the babies!

As of noon EST today, Affiliate Summit 2007 East, taking place July 8-10 in Miami, has reached capacity and registrations are closed.

We are currently working to secure more space. If this happens, we will open up registrations for the additional capacity.

Otherwise, when Affiliate Summit has sold out in the past, there has been a secondary market for passes on eBay. If you are interested in passes listed on eBay, please be sure to contact registration@affiliatesummit.com to confirm that the pass can be transferred.

All registrations have associated registration ID number. Request this number form the seller and provide it in your e-mail to the Affiliate Summit registration team, so they can determine whether the pass in question is transferable.

The keynote speaker at Affiliate Summit on Monday, July 9 will be humorist Ze Frank.

On Tuesday, July 10, the keynote will be a discussion featuring Rob Kniaz, Product Manager at Google, and Mark Papia, VP of Performance Marketing at FOX Interactive Media. The discussion will be led by Affiliate Summit MC, Lisa Riolo.

More details at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/.

It’s been over 2 years!  

I’m not sure if you were around in this industry back then (2 years in internet talk is like decades!). But, I still remember back in January 2005 when Affiliate Classroom, led by Anik Singal launched their first training center!

It swept the industry by storm, the biggest break-through was their “Step By Step” training program that is a web-based software that actually gives you small step by step instructions AND tracks your progress (on as many websits as you want).

Affiliate Classroom celebrated it’s two year anniversary a few months ago, and is now industry-wide recognized as a premium affiliate training center.

AVERAGE STUDENT SAW 11-40% INCREASE…

Talk about results, actually over 50% of the students reported seeing an increase in their business of over 23% after going through the information in the classroom!

 

From newbie to expert marketers…

As if it was not enough, Affiliate Classroom just announced a completely new training center! They took the last 2 years of experience and have revamped their entire training.

• - Made the step by step EVEN simpler
• - Added free tools - a Keyword research tool is one of them!
• - New interviews, case studies & more!

The best part is the SUPPORT that Affiliate Classroom has come to provide it’s students. It’s absolutely un-heard of.

They now have a team of over 10 people dedicated JUST to helping their AC students build their business.

DON’T DRINK COFFEE TODAY…

As if all this was not enough, Affiliate Classroom doesn’t charge you a crazy fee to use their training and participate in their 24/7 community - all Affiliate Classroom asks for you to get started is $1.

So, today, skip your coffee or soda and invest in the training that over the last 2 years has helped their students increase their business by 11-40%!

If nothing else, just go read the types of results they’ve produced (this really proves that ANYONE CAN make money online - just with the right training)!

Affiliate Classroom.com

The Blog Window widget, which enables bloggers to display their most popular posts on their blog or pages of their site, now incorporates affiliate advertisements.

Initially, the widget ads will be from Amazon, but later they will be expanding the advertising choices to other merchants.

Members of the Amazon Associates program can simply enter their Amazon Associates id number into the Blog Window widget and “the majority of all page views of the Blog Window widget will carry ads with your Amazon Associates id.”

Affiliates displaying this widget will earn commission directly from Amazon.

According to an announcement from Gene Kavner, creator of the widget, the ads will be contextual…

In an effort to increase click-through and conversion rates, we will try to serve the ads that match your site’s content.

More details on the Blog Window widget at http://affiliatebrand.com/BlogWindow/Description.aspx.

Every once so often, there is a marketing phenomena that cannot be ignored. On Friday, June 29, the Apple Store will debut the iPhone.

There are two types of iPhones: $499 for the 4 GB version and $599 for the 8 GB version.

I’ve seen lots of affiliates griping that the Apple affiliate program only pays 1% on sales. According to iSuppli, a research firm, the $499 iPhone costs Apple about $246 to produce, while the $599 model runs Apply about $281 to bring to stores.

Yeah, it would be nice if commissions on iPhones were a bit sweeter, but I think the potential with this offer is still very attractive for affiliates with the right audience. Apple is expected to move millions of iPhones over the next several months.

And consumers will only be able to buy the iPhone at Apple stores, the Apple site, and AT&T company-owned stores. The iPhone might be available in dozens of places online in the future, but this Friday, it’s just at the Apple Store online.

Personally, I won’t be getting one of these phones. don’t get me wrong, it looks really cool and has great features. But it’s missing one thing for me - the ability to sync up with Outlook. That’s a must for me, and the reason why I recently picked up a BlackBerry 8800.

But you can bet I’ll be promoting the iPhone come this Friday.

I was wondering if you knew why big CPA/CPC advertisers like E*TRADE, Scottrade, and TD AMERITRADE don’t have affiliate programs? In fact, as far as I tell, brokerage firms don’t even use traditional CPM/CPA ad networks to buy media.

I don’t really have any insight as to why they would choose not to engage in affiliate marketing. One thing I would speculate would be that it’s a regulation issue.

Credit cards, health insurance, and other areas are highly regulated, and I would imagine the same goes for brokerage firms.

Perhaps they consider it to be too much trouble to properly screen and monitor affiliates to comply with their industry guidelines, or maybe outsourcing account recruitment in this fashion is just not permissible for them.

We have around 4,000 affiliates in our system, and about five of the affiliates are doing PPC. My boss now wants me to tell them to stop on our brand names. Can we have them cap their bids so they don’t appear higher than the 2nd or 3rd spot? Is this practice considered fair to our affiliates or will it result in a shortfall of numbers?

There are a lot of ways that companies approach this issue. Generally the bigger brands do not allow affiliates to bid on the brand names, and they only permit affiliates to bid on generic terms.

Some other affiliate programs grant special consideration to a select group of affiliates to bid on the trademarked terms, and then there are affiliate programs that have a free for all when it comes to bidding on trademarks.

In my opinion, if you have a big brand you should not permit affiliates to bid on trademarked terms. This is something the merchant can easily do themselves, and affiliates that solely bid on trademarks are not bringing any value to the table.

That said, it’s fairly common for some of the bigger ppc affiliates to get permission to bid on trademarks, because they’re bidding on a large volume of words for the merchant.

The reasoning here is that the affiliate is taking a risk and loss on some of those words and the trademarks balance out some of that risk.

Stephanie Agresta, CEO of Stephanie Agresta Consulting, shared her thoughts on the relationship economy, a term coined by Doc Searls.

Events like this (LinkShare Symposium) really remind me of how important real, live social networking is. Of course, it’s great we’re on Twitter and Facebook, but face-to-face, talking to your partners, your customers, your clients… this is what the relationship economy is about.

Building quality partnerships and working together in synergistic ways. And LinkShare has done a great job of fueling that.

I was just reading over at The Next Net about how video search engine Blinkx is putting the final touches on a new advertising platform for Web video code-named Project Trilby.

When it launches next Monday it will be called blinkx AdHoc. It will offer media companies and video sites a way to place targeted ads alongside (or even in) Web videos based on the specific words spoken in the videos, as well as their overall context.

Web video advertising is the fastest-growing segment online, yet nobody really knows how to make those ads as relevant as search ads.

Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake says:

“You need something akin to AdSense for video, which is what we have built.”

This all sounds very interesting, but the pat about it being “AdSense for video” strikes me as a little odd. I mean, it’s one thing if a third party anoints it with such a moniker, but when the CEO says it about his own release?

After all, isn’t Google doing their own “AdSense for video” thing?