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1. Affiliate Summit Recap
2. ValueClick Buys Super Affiliate, MeziMedia
3. Affiliate Summit 2007 East Presentations
4. Affiliate Program News
5. Top 10 Affiliate Programs - June 2007
6. Affiliate Summit West 2008

 Google really wants you to have great success with the AdSense advertisements you put on your web pages.

Google would love to see you become an AdSense multimillionaire. Why? That’s easy. The more money you make with your Google AdSense advertisements, the more money Google makes.

So, basically, with their own interest foremost in their mind, Google has designed some really helpful tools to help you optimize your AdSense income. 

One of the AdSense optimization tools that Google supplies is what they call the Google “heat map”. The Google heat map shows you in living color the most effective placements of AdSense advertisements on your web pages.

You can see the Google heat map at:              http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

 

Now, if your site is primarily a forum site or a blog site please take note:  The most effective placements of AdSense advertisements is different for your blog and forum pages that for your content pages. You can see the heat map for blog and forum pages at:

 https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43868

More is better but you should not fill your pages up with the highest number of ad units allowed.

What I mean by more is really ‘more often’. 

Breaking up long articles or blocks of text into smaller segments and adding a ‘more’ link at the bottom of each section will allow you to add your AdSense advertisements to more pages on your website.

 

 Every time the reader sees the AdSense advertisement is yet another opportunity for you to get a clickthrough.

So optimizing your AdSense advertisements really depends upon two things;

1. Placement and
2. Frequency

When you place your AdSense advertisements in the most optimal position on each page and increase the number of pages on your website, you will be on your way to making the most out of your Adsense advertising dollars - and making more income too!  

Google is conducting a limited beta test with mobile Web site developers to display Google AdSense ads, according to PC World.

In the Google AdSense for Mobile beta, sites must be written in one of three mobile markup languages including WML (Wireless Markup Language), XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CHTML (Compact HTML) in order to use AdSense for Mobile, according to a Google AdSense for Mobile help page.

Sites must be in one of those mobile markup languages, so Google can crawl the pages and serve up relevant ads.

Hey Google - how about a plugin for WordPress like they’ve got at AdMob?

ValueClick has announced that they have agreed to acquire super affiliate, MeziMedia, Inc., a leading operator of U.S. comparison shopping websites.

MeziMedia ranked fourth in the June 2007 comScore “Retail – Comparison Shopping” category with approximately 10.5 million U.S. unique visitors through its Smarter.com comparison shopping and CouponMountain.com online coupon websites.

“MeziMedia is consistent with our acquisition philosophy and gives ValueClick comparison shopping scale in the U.S., greater search marketing expertise and a presence in China, all three of which are key growth initiatives for the Company,” said Tom Vadnais, chief executive officer of ValueClick. “This is an exciting acquisition and we look forward to welcoming the MeziMedia team to the ValueClick family.”

“We are proud of our significant accomplishments in comparison shopping, SEO and SEM and believe that the time is right to join forces with ValueClick, one of the largest and most diversified online marketing services companies,” said Talmadge O’Neill and Harry Tsao, co-founders of MeziMedia. “We are confident that MeziMedia and ValueClick will enjoy important benefits from this transaction and generate meaningful synergies across the combined businesses.”

ValueClick anticipates the acquisition will close in August 2007, at which time they will acquire MeziMedia for approximately $100 million in cash, plus an earn out.

The total transaction will range between $100 million and $352 million, depending on whether performance thresholds are met.

I was chatting with Leora Blumberg of Payoneer at Affiliate Summit about their prepaid debit MasterCard as an affiliate commission vehicle.

Here is how she describes the service…

“I work specifically with affiliate networks to pay out to affiliates using a prepaid debit MasterCard.

This is instead of checks (too slow), wires (too expensive) - we can move money on to the card in as quick as two hours, and other electronic methods are just too difficult.

We do offer branded cards. Certainly the entire online experience is branded, and we’d love to chat with you (affiliate networks) to make your payout side much simpler.”

I’d definitely welcome this as an affiliate commission alternative.

More details on Payoneer at http://www.payoneer.com/.

I’ve created a new account on Flickr for Affiliate Summit pictures.

The 1,500+ photos are broken out in sets for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

Please go in to add tags, notes and comments to the pictures of you, your friends and associates.

See all of the pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/affsum/.

There has been a bit of controversy over the hiring of “booth babes” to staff exhibit hall booths at online marketing conferences, so I thought it would be interesting to conduct a survey about it.

Brad Waller wrote about the topic on ReveNews earlier this week, and his perspective on it…

“There have already been enough debates on the idea of sex and marketing and the idea of booth babes to attract traffic to your trade show booth. Affiliate Summit has had it’s share, but I’d only accuse one exhibitor of using this tactic. I understand the idea and reasons, and I’m no prude. I enjoy the female form, but I also think that this can go wrong - really wrong.”

Some folks have suggested that we should enforce a dress code at Affiliate Summit, but that’s veering too much into a “Nanny state” for my taste.

Personally, I think this approach can be a bit counter-productive. There are the people who are repelled by a booth that has models staffing it, but that’s not my beef.

I generally don’t bother with any booth that appears to be staffed solely by temps. If I want to learn more about the company, I am going to want to ask questions. Not just pick up a flier.

But that’s just me. What do you think?

Please take the two question, anonymous survey and I will share the results.

Yahoo might be a little behind Google, but I see they are trying to catch up by launching their own customizable Search Engine.

If you look at our AC Blog sidebar, you will see the Google AFFoogle box (cute huh!). This engine allows the owner, in this case Affiliate Classroom, to customize the search results shown to the searcher.

The AFFoogle Search Engine will show only the search results that AC recommends. It’s really a handy, customizable search tool.

 

The Yahoo Search Builder is similiar and allows you to create your own Search Engine.

If you don’t want to check it out right now, the three cool things about having your own Search Engine is that you can:

1. Easily add web search and site search to your site
2. Tailor the look and feel of the search experience to match your site
3. Enhance the search engine algorithm to focus on your site’s topic

It’s another money-making tool that you might want to take a few minutes to add to your site.

I met Cresta Pillsbury, Director of Business Development for HACKER SAFE, at Affiliate Summit earlier this week. She mentioned how HACKER SAFE had created their own affiliate tracking and reporting, rather than joining up with an affiliate network.

So, I asked her why they chose to go that route…

“We chose to build our own affiliate program, which we launched two months ago.

When we looked into launching it, a lot of affiliates were coming to us and saying we needed an affiliate program. So I actually went to them and said, OK guys, if I do this, what do you want?

We really wanted to customize it to the affiliates to give them what they wanted. By bringing it in-house, we can control that and keep our affiliates happy.

HACKER SAFE is unique in the product that it is - it’s a service product. And we really want the best of breed affiliates, so we feel like there is more control by bringing it in-house.

We can track it better; we can make sure that support gets the sale immediately, so they can help the customers once they sign up through our affiliates.

That was really the main reason for keeping it in-house.”

 It seems like everyone in the Affiliate Marketing world is blogging about how great the Miami Affiliate Summit was, so I thought I would add my two cents worth.

If you’ve never been to an Affiliate Summit, now might be the time to make plans for the next one. It will be in Vegas, February 24-26, 2008.

The Affiliate Summit is THE BEST place to network, and pick the brains of some of the top Affiliate Marketers from all over the World. Everyone is there to exchange information - and even the Super Affiliates are approachable and willing to talk. Just go, ask questions, take in all the info, and you’ll know what to do with your Affiliate Marketing business for the next year!

Oh, and did I mention that the parties are spectacular, the food great, and the Seminars full of excellent information?

Just take my word for it, no matter what level you are at, after you have been to one of these events, you will never miss another one! 

Since you can read all about the happenings on other Affiliate Marketing Blogs, I thought I would pass on a few tidbits of useful information that I learned at the seminars. Here goes:

1. When using Adsense Ads, you will get the greatest click-through rate with the Large Rectangle (336×280). Use a white background, and blue heading with black text. DO NOT use a border.
2. When using Video, be sure to add captioning to the Video. You can do this on YouTube after you save your video.
3. There is a free tool called SEOQuake that gives you a snapshot of a bunch of information at the top of your page. I can’t go into complete detail here - it’s basically a Google Snapshot of page information like Alexa Rank, Page Rank, etc. I can say that one of the Super Affiliates I chatted with was VERY excited to get this tool on her computer. I think I’ll follow in her footsteps and do the same.
4. Don’t forget to use Keyword Research tools to target Long Tail Keywords. One of the most popular tools mentioned was Keyword Discovery, but Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool has been reincarnated and/or is still available.

OK, that’s it for now. I”ll be posting more of the great Affiliate Marketing tips I learned under more specific headings so you can find them easily in the future.

Stay on the lookout for Pay Per Click (PPC) Expert Tricks, Website Building Secrets, Landing Page Optimization, and much more!