Archive for November 2008
We would like to introduce our new screencasts series we’ve been producing over the last several weeks now. The goal of the AvantLink screencasts are to help current (or prospective) Affiliates and Merchants learn more about our network, and the technology we offer.
As you may already know, AvantLink offers an advanced, industry leading Affiliate Tool Suite that is entirely integrated as a part of our platform. Many of our tools utilized subscription entries for easy campaign management, and robust dynamic solutions that automate accurate product inventory and pricing for Affiliates. Oh yeah, and once you qualify to the network as an Affiliate, these tools come as a value-add part of membership. They’re all completely free of charge.
There are two categories of screencasts. One that includes tutorials for Affiliates, and the other that includes segments specific to Merchants. We’ll be adding more over time to our Tutorials category, but for now; let’s get started by featuring the Intro for Affiliates. After watching this screencast or any of the others to come, feel free to email support/at/avantlink.com if you have any questions.
Take a look at the Intro for Affiliates screencast below, or CLICK HERE to view the full sized version.
Introducing a new exclusive merchant at AvantLink:
Read the program launch announcement from this merchant…
At WhiskeyMilitia.com, we sell the sickest clothes and gear for both snow and skateboarding, and decided to do it for dirt cheap. This gear hits the site one deal at a time all day and all night, 24/7/365. We’re raiding the warehouses of the sickest brands in the biz and giving you stuff at next to nothing.
The WhiskeyMilitia affiliate program is unique and unlike any other affiliate model out there. Here is the low-down: WhiskeyMilitia will pay affiliates a $5 bounty for any new customer they refer to WhiskeyMilitia’s family of one deal at a time sites which includes Tramdock, Chainlove, and SteepandCheap. WhiskeyMilitia’s $5 new customer bounty will not be extended to Backcountry’s retail sites which includes Backcountry, BackcountryOutlet, and Dogfunk despite there being leaks to these sites. The WhiskeyMilitia affiliate program operates under very separate program terms from the Backcountry affiliate program – please understand this before promoting Backcountry’s one deal at a time sites.
We offer a 120-day cookie duration period and a $5 new customer bounty.
- $5 New Customer Bounty
- Cookie Duration: 120 Days
- 30 Day Return/Exchange Policy
- Dynamically updating product banners through Avantlink’s Deal of the Day tool
- We carry the Best Brands in the industry, such as Pearl Izumi, and Shimano, which means more motivated buyers and better conversion
- Dedicated Program Management – An expert team is available to answer questions and to help make you a success. Monthly newsletters keep you informed of the latest information regarding the WhiskeyMilitia.com program.
SIGN UP for the WhiskeyMilitia.com program in Avantlink!
Introducing a new exclusive merchant at AvantLink:
Read the program launch announcement from this merchant…
At Chainlove.com we sell premium bike products at cut-rate prices. We’re talking completes, components, apparel, tools—just name your vice. Here’s how it works: We slap a primo piece of cycling gear on our site at a discounted price and sell it until it’s gone. As soon as the deal sells out we throw another one right up. Non-stop bike deals all day long.
The Chainlove affiliate program is unique and unlike any other affiliate model out there. Here is the low-down: Chainlove will pay affiliates a $5 bounty for any new customer they refer to Chainlove’s family of one deal at a time sites which includes WhiskeyMilitia, SteepandCheap, and Tramdock. Chainlove’s $5 new customer bounty will not be extended to Backcountry’s retail sites which includes Backcountry, BackcountryOutlet, and Dogfunk despite there being leaks to these sites. The Chainlove affiliate program operates under very separate program terms from the Backcountry affiliate program – please understand this before promoting Backcountry’s one deal at a time sites.
We offer a 120-day cookie duration period and a $5 new customer bounty.
- $5 New Customer Bounty
- Cookie Duration: 120 Days
- 30 Day Return/Exchange Policy
- Dynamically updating product banners through Avantlink’s Deal of the Day tool
- We carry the Best Brands in the industry, such as Pearl Izumi, and Shimano, which means more motivated buyers and better conversion
- Dedicated Program Management – An expert team is available to answer questions and to help make you a success. Monthly newsletters keep you informed of the latest information regarding the Chainlove.com program.
SIGN UP for the Chainlove.com program in Avantlink!
Introducing a new exclusive merchant at AvantLink:
Read the program launch announcement from this merchant…
At Tramdock.com we have hoarded all the best ski deals in the industry and we’re triggering the gear-slide right onto your computer screen, an endless storm of huge discounts, on planks, boots, and ski-specific gear. Here’s how we do it: We slap a smokin’ hot piece of ski gear on our site at a ridiculous price and sell it until it’s gone. When it’s gone another deal hits the screen before you can blink an eye.
The Tramdock affiliate program is unique and unlike any other affiliate model out there. Here is the low-down: Tramdock will pay affiliates a $5 bounty for any new customer they refer to Tramdock’s family of one deal at a time sites which includes WhiskeyMilitia, Chainlove, and SteepandCheap. Tramdock’s $5 new customer bounty will not be extended to Backcountry’s retail sites which includes Backcountry, BackcountryOutlet, and Dogfunk despite there being leaks to these sites. The Tramdock affiliate program operates under very separate program terms from the Backcountry affiliate program – please understand this before promoting Backcountry’s one deal at a time sites.
We offer a 120-day cookie duration period and a $5 new customer bounty.
- $5 New Customer Bounty
- Cookie Duration: 120 Days
- 30 Day Return/Exchange Policy
- Dynamically updating product banners through Avantlink’s Deal of the Day tool
- We carry the Best Brands in the industry, such as Pearl Izumi, and Shimano, which means more motivated buyers and better conversion
- Dedicated Program Management – An expert team is available to answer questions and to help make you a success. Monthly newsletters keep you informed of the latest information regarding the Tramdock.com program.
SIGN UP for the Tramdock.com program in Avantlink!
Introducing a new exclusive merchant at AvantLink:
Read the program launch announcement from this merchant…
At SteepandCheap.com, we sell premium, core outdoor gear and clothing at prices that are downright criminal. SteepandCheap sells one screaming deal at a time until it’s gone. The deals are so great (up to 80% off and no less than 50% off), they sell out fast. As soon as one deal sells out, we kick off another. It’s back-to-back deals all day long.
The SteepandCheap Affiliate program is unique and unlike any other affiliate model out there. Here is the low-down: SteepandCheap will pay affiliates a $5 bounty for any new customer they refer to SteepandCheap’s family of one deal at a time sites which includes WhiskeyMilitia, Chainlove, and Tramdock. SteepandCheap’s $5 new customer bounty will not be extended to Backcountry’s retail sites which includes Backcountry, BackcountryOutlet, and Dogfunk despite there being leaks to these sites. The SteepandCheap affiliate program operates under very separate program terms from the Backcountry Affiliate program – please understand this before promoting Backcountry’s one deal at a time sites.
We offer a 120-day cookie duration period and a $5 new customer bounty.
- $5 New Customer Bounty
- Cookie Duration: 120 Days
- 30 Day Return/Exchange Policy
- Dynamically updating product banners through Avantlink’s Deal of the Day tool
- We carry the Best Brands in the industry, such as Pearl Izumi, and Shimano, which means more motivated buyers and better conversion
- Dedicated Program Management – An expert team is available to answer questions and to help make you a success. Monthly newsletters keep you informed of the latest information regarding the SteepandCheap.com program.
SIGN UP for the SteepandCheap.com program in Avantlink!
The economic news has been depressing the last couple of months. The financial industry is melting down, stock market plummeting and not a day goes by that we don’t hear about a major company laying off a significant part of their work force.
Most merchants are preparing for what could be a major recession. If you’re responsible for your company’s online marketing, chances are that you will or already have been asked to analyze where best to spend your online marketing dollars.
So how can AvantLink help, and why should I invest my marketing dollars in AvantLink’s performance marketing Affiliate network?
1. True performance marketing.
We are a true performance marketing network. This means that once you pay the network integration fee, you don’t pay any monthly minimums or any other hidden fees. We don’t have nickel and dime charges you find in other networks that add up to significantly higher marketing costs. This is recession proof marketing in that you only pay for results.
2. Thorough network level Affiliate screening.
Because we screen Affiliates thoroughly at the network level, you don’t have to spend time screening and filtering Affiliates at the program level, ultimately saving you money. This also means that the vast majority of Affiliates in AvantLink are active, ethical, and savvy marketing professionals.
3. Industry leading support.
We fully support the Affiliates and merchants in our network. Affiliates know they can come directly to us with questions about tools, ads, reporting, tracking, etc. because they know we will respond promptly. This translates into a greatly reduced support workload for you.
4. Innovation.
We are your partner for innovation. We are constantly working on new tools, and better functionality. If Affiliates or merchants come to us with innovative and feasible technology ideas, we will develop them. Many of our tools were created in exactly this manner. We’re dedicated to getting Affiliates and merchants the technology they need to increase sales.
5. Brand protection.
By default, our network level terms do not allow Affiliates to bid on your trade name, domain name or mis-spellings. Most networks have many rogue affiliates who try to get away with bidding on trade/domain names wherever and whenever possible. Not paying commissions as a result of trade/domain name bidding translates into huge savings, and more protection for your brand.
In a recession it’s more important than ever to spend your marketing dollars wisely. AvantLinks’ true performance marketing network model means your marketing dollars are only going towards results. For more information, or to speak with an AvantLink sales representative, please email sales/at/avantlink.com. Mention this article and get a special discount on integration.
Scott Kalbach
Founder/CEO
Introducing a new exclusive AvantLink merchant:
Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works
Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works was founded in 1994 as a specialty mountaineering store in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The business has grown to include a high-converting ecommerce store, and you can now promote their Affiliate program on AvantLink. Their website (SDCMountainworks.com) and Affiliate program is yet another retailer that’s now a part of the largest and most competitive Outdoor/Recreation category in the Affiliate marketing industry.
Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works is independently owned, providing the finest outdoor equipment, apparel and accessories combined with excellent customer service and customer satisfaction. If you’re looking for a specialty outdoor store that will convert your traffic, look no further. They offer a 8% baseline payout, with 120 day cookie life. Here are some highlights from their Affiliate program detail page on AvantLink:
Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works has served the outdoor community for over 15 years. We love to get outdoors and test the gear and clothing we sell. Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works “where our work is your play!”
- Free shipping on all orders over $50
- Best Selling brands in the outdoor industry
- Unique Apparel and the finest product selection
- Satisfaction Guaranteed 30 day return program
Read the program launch announcement on ABestWeb.
Let us know what we can do to help you get started promoting Sangre de Cristo Mountain Works. Contact anyone at AvantLink or the program manager Jon Asher, jon/at/sdcmountainworks.com.
Gary & AvantLink
Post Your Black Friday & Cyber Monday Promotions at ABW
Cool idea from the team at AbestWeb.com. If you have promos running for Q4 check it out. If you haven’t gotten to know the community at ABestWeb.com yet… It’s time to get involved, and get your promos in front of Affiliates with this special offer.
Trust wrote:
This thread is open to all merchants so they can post any Black Friday or Cyber Monday coupons or promotions only.
Merchant:
Promotion:
Short Description:
Dates Valid:
Join Program: (insert link)No signatures
No commenting on the deals. If you have any questions, contact the merchant or AM.
We’re excited to announce some significant changes to the Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) tool that we first released just over one year ago. The ALE has proven to be a very successful tool for our affiliate base: nearly 3% of our overall network sales in October 2008 were a result of using the ALE. By comparison, that’s more sales than our Deal of the Day or Product Display Builder tools, combined! Hopefully the functionality we’ve added will continue to build on that success, and help blog & forum owners especially continue to use the ALE effectively.
Before getting into the exact details of the improvements, let us state one very important fact: none of the existing ALE deployments will be broken, or indeed affected in any way, by these changes. We were able to maintain full backwards-compatibility with the original version of the tool, so if you’re already perfectly happy with the functionality of the ALE then you don’t have to change a thing. But if you want to squeeze just a bit more value out of your content then by all means read on!
So, on to the specifics of the improvements:
- The ALE now supports the encoding of plain text (a.k.a. “keyword encoding”) in your page content. Previously, only pre-existing direct links such as <a href=”http://…”> www.backcountry.com </a> would be converted to affiliate tracking links. Now, it’s possible to configure the ALE to not even require an existing direct link to the merchant: instead, it can operate simply on the mention of the merchant, e.g. Backcountry.com (take a look at the source of this page to verify that this link is NOT tagged in any way in the original page content).
- Now you may be thinking: “What about all of my pre-existing links – I don’t want those rewritten!“ Don’t worry, we’re not going to completely mangle your page: keywords that appear inside existing links are left alone.
- With keyword encoding turned on, the ALE will (by default) automatically look for the name or URL of any of your active merchants in page content, and turn those into trackable links. You can override this default behavior by choosing which, if any, merchants should be encoded for a given ALE deployment.
- You can also specify completely custom keyword/key-phrase associations to encode. For instance, the ALE subscription used for this blog post is set up to link the phrase “Love the Madness” to moosejaw.com, and “Gear Store” to altrec.com.
- You can even specify certain pieces of text that should not be encoded as affiliate links; some people call these skip-words. That’s why “www.backcountry.com” a few sentences above (and here) is not showing as a link: in the ALE configuration for this blog post, that phrase is set up as something to ignore.
- We’ve added the ability to specify some CSS/formatting for your encoded links. Built-in options include adding a “title” tag of “This is an affiliate ad link.”, a double-underline format, or even specifying a custom CSS class name to use for all of the links. You can mix & match these options too, to further customize your setup.
- Lastly, when you use the ALE tool now you actually create a subscription/configuration entry. This allows you to make changes to your ALE deployment without going back through all of your pages to update the javascript include. It also allows some more advanced reporting on our end, such as which of your ALE subscriptions a particular click-through or sale resulted from; for keyword encoding our reports will even show which word or phrase was clicked on, leading to a particular sale.
Whether you’re a long-time user of the Affiliate Link Encoder already or just getting started with it, you should definitely take a few minutes to experiment with these new options. Just go to the “Tools” page of your affiliate account and click on “Create a new ALE subscription”.
Best of luck!
-David & AvantLink
Time to expand the Testimonials category on our Affiliate Marketing Blog to include AvantLink merchants. We’ve been publishing Affiliate testimonials for a while now, but we also have a bunch of Merchant testimonials to share. To start things off, here is what Chuck Hamrick sent us recently on behalf of Affiliate Crew’s client Little Giant Ladder.
AffiliateCrew.com has been very pleased with the technology and support that AvantLink has given us on the Little Giant Ladder Affiliate program. When we wanted to test an unscrappable coupon code, AvantLink was the only network capable of giving us the tools necessary to make it work. Scott Kalbach and team are always one step ahead of our needs with new features coming out monthly. Gary Marcoccia has helped promote our program(s) and given us invaluable advise for online PR. AvantLink creates Affiliate tools that people want to make their sites convert better in these competitive times.
Chuck Hamrick
AffiliateCrew.com
Thanks Chuck! We value our partnership with Affiliate Crew, Little Giant Ladder and their fine Affiliates.
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