Introducing a new, exclusive AvantLink merchant:

gearSlash

gearSlash is the latest addition to our industry leading One Deal at a Time (ODAT) category, and it’s a very compelling opportunity for any Affiliate with outdoor or deal oriented sites/traffic. For starters, gearSlash will not ding you for a return. All commissions paid are final and not subject to reversal transactions! Additionally, how does a 7% baseline payout on (up to 80% off) snowboard gear deals sound? Compare that payout to the other daily deal or ODAT programs out there, and you’ll clearly see this is a killer opportunity.

From their Affiliate program details: Not only do we serve up to 80% off the choicest snowboard gear; we also provide the little things like daily shipment and world class customer service. gearSlash provides a marketing twist in that all product sales are customer driven. We give our customer the power to ‘Vote’ on what item becomes the next sale. The item with the most votes at each sale’s conclusion becomes the Spotlight Sale.

Program highlights include:

• Sliding Commission Scales:
  • 7% baseline
  • 8% for sales in one month over $1000
  • 9% for sales in one month over $3000
• 100% parasite free
• Deal Of The Day Tool
• Dynamic HTML banners
• Detailed reporting
• Network support from qualified professionals

Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting gearSlash. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Steven Berrebi, steve/at/gearslash.com.

Introducing a new, exclusive AvantLink merchant:

Canyon Hobbies

Earn commissions on over 40,000 SKUs from top R/C brands such as Traxxas, HPI, Losi, Venom, Pro-Line, Spektrum, E-Flite, ParkZone and much more. Canyon Hobbies is the premiere radio control store on the Internet! What do you get when you join? First and foremost you get a comprehensive Affiliate program dedicated to helping you achieve high conversion rates, and sales (7% baseline payout, worldwide shipping, 45 day cookie).

From their Affiliate program details: At CanyonHobbies.com we have a dedicated support structure designed to attract quality Affiliates such as yourself and reward them for their hard work in promoting our company. This combined with our great product line and outstanding customer service will significantly increase your commissions.

Program highlights include:

• 7% Commission.
• Largest and Best List of Brands in the Hobby Industry.
• Worldwide Shipping.
• 45 Day Cookie.
• Most orders ship within 24 Hours.
• Average order of $150.00.

Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting Canyon Hobbies. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Pam Vigil, pam/at/canyonhobbies.com.

Introducing a new, exclusive AvantLink merchant:

Skinny Skis

Based out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Skinny Skis specializes in selling top brand gear, apparel and accessories for Nordic skiing. Skinny Skis has been in business for over 35 years and they are one of the nation’s best online sources for high end Nordic gear. Their site is dialed, they have a very responsive program manager and this is an Affiliate program exclusive to our Affiliate network…so you know your traffic is shielded from the cookie theft of unscrupulous Affiliates.

Earn 8% baseline, with 12% potentialm on a 120-day cookie. From their Affiliate program details: Our extensive inventory is available to cross-country and skate skiing enthusiasts nationwide, offering the best selection of Nordic skiing equipment from the industry’s most influential manufacturers – Fischer, Atomic, Rossignol, Madshus, Salomon, and Swix.

Program highlights include:

• Commission Payout: 8%, 12% potential
• Cookie Duration: 120 Days
• Avg. Order Size: $125+
• 30 Day Return/Exchange Policy
• 100% Low Price Guarantee
• Daily Updated Product Datafeed
• PayPal and All Major Credit Cards Accepted

Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting Skinny Skis. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Katie Jackson, katie/at/skinnyskis.com.

Just a quick post to let you know that we released some updates to the affiliate email tool for merchants. Here’s an overview of the changes to this tool.

1. The first thing you’ll notice is that the interface has been simplified significantly.

2. We removed the text email option. Instead, all emails will contain a standard text email part that allows those with text only email capabilities to link to the full HTML version of the email.

3. The HTML email form element has been converted to use the YUI Rich Text Editor which allows for rich formatting of text content, much like a standard word processor.

4. Ad campaigns and personalization text variable tags can now be inserted directly into your email without having to copy and paste HTML like the old version of this tool.

5. Emails can now be scheduled for future delivery. As part of this functionality, we’ve also also added the ability for you to insert staged ad campaigns into your emails. This means that you can setup promotional ads and emails before the promotion start date and schedule the email to be delivered when the promotion goes live. No more staying up late or getting up at the crack of dawn to get your promotional emails out

Scott Kalbach
AvantLink.com

This week we’ve released a few new features in our ProductSearch API module, aimed at improving the control affiliates have over how the search is actually performed.

First, there is now the ability to specify multiple search terms within one API request.  For instance, suppose you wanted to search for two kinds of snowboards, say the “Technine Icon Series Snowboard” and the “Rossignol Alias Snowboard”.  The best option, the one that gives you the most control over what results to show to your users, was – and still is – to do two separate API requests, one for each type of snowboard.  However, you now also have the option of making one search request, using “OR” syntax, e.g. “search_term=Technine Icon Series Snowboard OR Rossignol Alias Snowboard”; the API will automatically perform both searches separately and then combine the results for you.  To enable this functionality you must turn on an advanced syntax option for the API by adding the parameter “search_advanced_syntax=1″ to your request.

To see the effects yourself, take a look at the following search results for those two snowboards, with and without the new advanced syntax option turned on:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_layout=list&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_term=Technine+Icon+Series+Snowboard+OR+Rossignol+Alias+Snowboard&search_advanced_syntax=0
[Without advanced syntax, search terms are not processed separately, and results tend to be dominated by just one group.]

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_layout=list&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_term=Technine+Icon+Series+Snowboard+OR+Rossignol+Alias+Snowboard&search_advanced_syntax=1
[With advanced search, each search term is treated separately, and results are more evenly spread.]

The next addition, also requiring the use of the advanced syntax option, is the ability to flag portions of your search term as required in all matches, or as “stop” words (terms that if found, should exclude an item from your results).  You can use the “+” and “-” characters to indicate terms that must or must not be present in your search results; you can even enclose groups of words in parentheses and then preface the whole group with a “+” or “-” character to quickly modify a whole series of keywords.  As an example, suppose you were looking for a particular jacket from The North Face; you might start off with a very simple search of “The North Face jackets”:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_advanced_syntax=1&search_term=The+North+Face+jackets

But then you decide that you’re really only interested in the “Khumbu” style of jacket, so you can add “+Khumbu” to your search to require that “Khumbu” be present in each result, e.g

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_advanced_syntax=1&search_term=The+North+Face+jackets+%2BKhumbu

In case you’re wondering what that “%2B” business is, that’s the encoded equivalent of the “+” character; if you’re using PHP the urlencode() function can do this for you easily.  Finally, suppose that you’re interested only in Boy’s or Men’s versions of the jacket; you could add “-Girl -Women” or alternatively “-(Girl Women)” to your request to further filter the results:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_advanced_syntax=1&search_term=The+North+Face+jackets+%2BKhumbu+-(Girl+Women)

The third, and last, of the improvements to the ProductSearch API does not involve the advanced syntax option, but rather adds the ability to specify which pieces of information (”input fields”) should be considered in a search.  Ordinarily a product search will consider all of the available, searchable information, specifically: product SKUs, names, UPCs, brand name/manufacturer details, and categorization data.  If you want to perform a very specific type of search however, you can use the “search_input_fields”  parameter to restrict your search to use just one or more of these pieces of information.  A common example would be if you were doing product name lookups only, and did not want brand name or categorization data to factor into your results at all.  Consider the following example to see the differences in a normal versus a field-restricted search for “GPS Running Watches”:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_results_options=interleave&search_term=GPS+Running+Watches
[Searching all available fields can sometimes yield seemingly unrelated results, often due to categorization data which mentions some of the search keywords.]

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_results_options=interleave&search_term=GPS+Running+Watches&search_input_fields=name
[Searching only product names yields a much more tightly restricted set of results.]

If you get a chance to try out these advanced features on any projects of your own, be sure to let us know!

-David & AvantLink

P.S. Don’t forget about the API Request Builder (available from the “Tools” page of your affiliate account) – it can be a big help with learning about and experimenting with our API modules and their parameters.

Attention Outdoor Affiliates

We’re going to have a big day on January 23rd at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market 2010! We already posted about the Outdoor Retailer Educational Seminar we’re sponsoring that day. But in addition to the educational seminar we are also having our second Outdoor Affiliate Meet & Greet at the Salt Lake Hilton’s Trofi Restaurant from 5-8pm that evening.

Check out previous blog posts here and here for info on our first meet and greet this past July. This event worked out very well, with many AvantLink Affiliates and Merchants getting quality face time. As a result of such a good turnout, we have extended the time by one hour and doubled the food and beverage budget.

Hope to see you there! Please RSVP if you plan to attend by emailing support/at/avantlink.com.

As an AvantLink Affiliate who operates an outdoor related website, we would like to invite you to join us on January 23rd for our second Outdoor Affiliate Meet and Greet at the Salt Lake City Hilton!

This event will take place Saturday evening from 5-8pm during the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market 2010 across the street from the Salt Palace Convention Center. The idea is to get a strong contingent of AvantLink Outdoor/Recreation Affiliates and merchants together to meet face-to-face and talk shop. We will have hors d’oeuvres, cocktails and give-a-ways from participating merchants.

Sponsors of the Outdoor Affiliate Meet and Greet include Altrec.com Outdoors, Backcountry.com, Massey’s Professional Outfitters, The House, and the Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketer’s Association. If you are planning on (or considering) attending the 2010 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market, we would love to have you.

Please RSVP by Emailing support/at/avantlink.com

We recently completed an overhaul of our video ad support here at AvantLink.

First and foremost, we’ve switched over to using the Flowplayer video player for displaying our videos.  We feel that Flowplayer provides a better user experience than our previous player, and it offers a few more features than we had access to previously, like built-in support for viewing videos in full-screen mode.  The initial load-time of the player, prior to clicking the “Play” button is faster than our old solution as well, which is a welcome change.

Additionally, with this upgrade we were able to add scripting to make click-through behavior much more obvious to users.  Moving the mouse pointer onto the video screen now triggers the display of a message stating that you can click on the video to visit the merchant site.  As always, such click-throughs are properly enabled for affiliate tracking, so videos are monetized just like any other text or banner ad.

Take a look at this video below from Brownells.com about their “Uplula Universal Magazine Loader” (a pretty nifty accessory for those handgun users out there) if you want to see these new features in action.

As always, let us know if you have any comments or questions.

-David & AvantLink

Introducing a new AvantLink merchant:

PointBanner

We have added another merchant to our “Marketing” category! Earn 15% on the order total by promoting custom banner design services from PointBanner. Check out their site & packages, and we think you’ll agree that if you have the traffic…this program is definitely worth joining. Here is a snippet from their Affiliate program details on AvantLink:

PointBanner.com allows online marketers to quickly order fully-customized banner ads and receive professionally designed, campaign-ready graphics within 48 hours. Formed to help marketing managers, small-business owners, affiliate marketers and eBay merchants slash the cost of production to as low as $49 per ad, PointBanner.com improves campaign quality with eye-catching banners that are uniquely created for each client.

Program highlights include:

• 15% payout
• 60 day cookie
• Average order value $100
• Site conversion rate 3%

Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting PointBanner. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Ayal Ebert, ayal/at/pointbanner.com.

We are sponsoring an educational seminar at the 2010 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market on January 23rd. It’s an introductory session for retailers and direct-to-consumer brands in the Outdoor/Recreation category. Although anyone can attend. Here are the seminar details…

Intro to Affiliate Marketing (for Outdoor Retailers)
Saturday, Jan 23, 2010 – 12:00PM to 1:00PM

Type: Seminar
Track: Retailer Seminar
Location: Salt Lake City Marriott Downtown, Salon E

Learn the fundamentals of performance-based Affiliate marketing from the leaders in the industry. We will talk about how your web store can utilize the most cost effective marketing channel online, the processes for getting started, and how to make the program a long-term success for your company. If you’re curious about performance-based marketing for retailers, already running an Affiliate program or looking at getting a program started, don’t miss this! The seminar will include short presentations and Q&A from some of the top web marketers in the Outdoor category.

Drop us a line if you have any questions about this event. We’re also having an Outdoor Affiliate Meet & Greet that evening – same day. Here is some info on our first OR meet and greet this past summer…more on that soon!