http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-breaking-cbs-acquiring-cnet-for-18-billion/

Build A Sales Team Without The Overhead

Are you developing new revenue channels by tapping into the power of Internet marketers and publishers? With the highly competitive online wine landscape, it’s critical to fully leverage the power of the web in your favor - particularly finding ways to work with savvy Internet marketers.

Affiliate marketing is a practice that provides stores the opportunity to generate more sales, while generally developing a payment structure that best suits their business model. It is essentially a revenue sharing agreement between a website owner (publisher, portal, blogger, etc.) and an online merchant. As an online merchant there are tools and resources available to get started building an affiliate program. To give a quick crash course on the options available, I will be documenting some tips, including service providers and examples, which will enable wineries and retailers to visualize the potential and low barrier to entry for forming their own affiliate marketing campaign.

I am surprised to see more wine stores have not already embarked on this marketing play with the current rise of Web 2.0 and direct shipping slowly shifting the market. Today is the perfect time to begin and work out the kinks! Considering the average cut a distributor historically takes (30% on a fair day), affiliates leave room for higher margins and can help you flourish as the online wine industry continues to evolve.

Pay On Your Terms

There are generally three common options and payment types for developing an affiliate program.

1. Pay Per Click – This is the least common when it comes to online retailer programs. When a potential customer leaves an affiliates website through clicking on an ad (whether be a banner, text link, product, etc), money is deposited into the affiliates account as part of the arrangement. Basically in this relationship, the affiliate operates as a toll taker… offering you traffic in exchange for a fee every time they come into your site.

Read my full article published originally at WineMarketer.com here >>

Do you know what keywords you are optimizing for? If you do, are they the right keywords to get the conversions you need? Once you get past that, a detailed on-site analysis should be performed to identify keyword development, internal linking structure, page layout, and keyword density among other things.

Well can I get a price now?

Unfortunately not. Let’s look at some off-site factors. What does your competition look like? Are there 100,000 competitors for your keywords or 2,000,000? Who are the top dogs in your field? Let’s do an analysis of their strategies and site to get a gauge on these top competitors.

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Increasing Power of Blogs

With 3 clicks and no technical knowledge needed, anyone in the world can create a blog. This fact alone drives professional journalists up a wall as their new competition may not be traditionally trained writers with degrees, but bloggers with a loyal following (who also happen to enjoy wine).

Wine blogging provides an opportunity for amateur writers to rise to the ranks of respected wine media members. We have seen it countless times in our own industry. Alder Yarrow, who spends his days managing an interactive design firm, is one of the most sought after and respected wine writers because of his blog Vinography.com. But it didn’t come overnight; it was because of his enthusiasm, posting frequency, knowledge, and ultimately his ability to harness a loyal user base around his content.

Paris Hilton is a brand (whether you like it or not). What does this have to do with wine you ask? In this same sense, Blogger’s become their own brand with an identifying voice, creating market opportunities abound. From book deals to industry partnerships – your identity can become a commercial venture even if it only started off as a single blog post.

Find Your Brand Ambassadors

Obviously, in my opinion, all wineries and retailers should have their own blog and editorial outlet to provide a voice and casual feedback mechanism for their customers. However, that is for another column. Today, I am here to highlight the power that a third party blogger can have for your brand.

Malcolm Gladwell first used the term “maven” in his book The Tipping Point describing those who are intense gatherers of information and impressions. In his book, he also references “connectors,” or people who have a trusted network that can distribute the message of the maven. Is this starting to sound like the workings of a successful blog? I know this was not Malcolm’s original intention, but this concept translates beautifully to the power of the blogosphere.

Blogs have something that many new (and even some old) brands may not have - mavens. And even if you already do, you can always use more. Think of mavens as brand ambassadors, reading a blog daily, commenting and ultimately spreading that blog and its messages to others on a consistent basis.

The Connector Chain

You, as winery, retailer, and brand, want these same mavens to find you as they utilize multiple “connectors” to spread their message! But how? Begin working the “connector chain.”

I could talk about the connector chain for hours. Every industry and even every specific niche of an industry has one. One of the best well known examples is the career of Donald Trump. Recognizing at a young age he needed to be with the best, he left Fordham University after 2 years to attend the University of Pennsylvania to pit himself against the best and brightest. From there, he played the “connector chain,” taking a job with his father’s company, leveraging his personal and family connections to ultimately build his own brand into hotels, books, TV, neck ties and even steaks! (more…)

I have used phpAdsNew, which is now OpenX, and haven’t had many issues. However, like most of us out there, I would welcome the opportunity to give Google Ad Manager a run around the block. It will be a hosted solution, which is also very intriguing to small businesses who don’t want to hassle with upgrading and maintaining their ad service software. Since I started using phpAdsNew they have merged to become OpenAds followed by OpenX. During this time, I really only upgraded the package once.

I am also extremely interested to see how Google Ad Manager integrates with AdSense to maximize ad campaigns.

I just applied online and received my first email:

Hello Mark Spangler,

 

Thanks for your interest in the Google Ad Manager beta launch. We’ve received your application and will review it as soon as we can. Because we’re rolling Ad Manager out in stages, it could be several weeks before you hear from us. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

 

If we determine your site is a good fit for our beta launch, we’ll contact you with instructions for getting started.

 

We’ll also email you if your site is not a good fit at this time. However, we’ll hold your application on file and contact you when we are able to open up Google Ad Manager to more publishers in the future.

 

Sincerely,

 

The Google Ad Manager Team

Let’s hope next post, I have something to report!

As business’ grow it’s always tough to give up on free services to begin paying for something that at first glance you think provides the same exact thing. Maybe this is my own weakness, but I always love the sound of free when it comes to business utilities. Atleast I can admit my addiction. And not that I plan on replacing Google Analytics anytime soon, but I made the leap for a paid newsletter management service, just to make life a little more easier and so far - it has.

Over the past month, I have been using Constant Contact to manage email newsletter services at WineMarketer.com and slowly incorporating it at ClassicWines.com and most likely in other places. I can utilize a single account for multiple newsletters and better yet, from multiple sites (see: they allow you to confirm multiple FROM email address across domains). Constant Contact bills you on the number of contacts as oppossed to the number of newsletters or sites. 

I do know that phpList provides some of the same features, but go read their documentation and feel free to tell me how frustrating it can be to fully harness the power of the services. I’ve lived it.

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So Andrew Baron, of Rocketboom fame, has in a move of ingenuity decided to sell his Twitter account. Please note my sarcasm in the previous sentence. You can see the eBay auction here. Ridiculous.

Buying Andrew Baron’s Twitter account is like joining a fraternity in college - it’s a lot quicker and easier in the beginning to pay for your friends. Let’s just hope they throw great parties to make it worthwhile. Right now the bid is at $1,550.00 with 7 days left - with 1397 Twitter followers, this values you (if you are one of his followers) at $1.11. You’re worth every penny. Let’s see what they are worth in the end.

On a related note, I have an AOL Screenname from when I was 7. It hasn’t been used since I was 13, but had a few hundred friends. I’m willing to let it go for 10k or an awesome MySpace account. </sarcasm>

UPDATE: Mr. Baron has taken down the auction. I guess he came to his senses. When reached for a comment… uh nevermind.

Social Media Optimization is a means of generating brand awareness, publicity and ultimately traffic and customers through the use of online communities and websites. Many of today’s web users interact in these networks everyday for social interaction. And parents, they are spending more hours on these sites a day then you may want to know. No wonder why Johnny failed his last math test.

I am not talking about advertising on these sites (although that does provide some very targeted traffic depending on the site - i.e. facebook), but interacting on their platforms utilizing their free services and networking capabilities.

Here are a few of the social networks, ClassicWines.com as an example, are a part of:

Twitter - Twitter is essentially a “micro-blogging” service that allows you to keep people updated about what you are up to through your cell phone, sms, im or through the web.

MySpace - You all know what MySpace is. For businesses it provides another landing page and outlet for social media interaction. With their features such as embedded video (we post videos through MySpace TV), groups, bulletins and more it provides a great way to link to a whole new community.

Facebook - Similar to MySpace, Facebook let’s businesses connect with a whole new demographic. With their suite of applications and networking capabilities, it is a simpler process to immediately connect with people with similar interests.

Video Sites - As there is a video componenet to ClassicWines.com with Classic Wines TV, distribution and interacting with the video community is very important. Aside from just posting on as many sites as possible, we try to get as much value out of the each community as possible - which involves also giving to the community. This is done through strategic video titling, descriptions and pro-actively communicating with each community - adding friends, commenting on videos, subscriptions, etc.

Some popular video sites we distribute to AND interact in: Blip.tv, YouTube, HowCast, metacafe, you get the point…

So what’s the point of all of this?

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A booming industry with limited competition. SEO can be fun when you rank not only number 1 for the search term, but in this case number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5…. Next, let’s make a run for “wine”!

Tracking your results daily can be frustrating, but I highly recommend using Google Analytics to monitor your SEM performance and tracking trends to help you see over time how your daily linking strategies and content can help boost your rankings.

Yes, I know it’s not a highly competitive keyword,  but it’s good for practice to test the waters and tactics for specific keywords to keep your skills sharp. Keep in mind the majority of what you read about SEO is probably not guaranteed true, and sometimes trial and error can be the best education when it comes to search engine optimization.

Just this past week Google has introduced a “search-within-search” featured to allow users to further hammer down results.

Many publishers are up in arms about how this can effect their bottom line, while some are open to this change. Many publishers and shopping sites what you to use our internal site search function for multiple reasons.

1. It gives you more contextually relevant results and display whether be recommendations or advertising.

2 More often than not you are getting real time results.

a. for example, every page on a site adding new products daily (i.e. ClassicWines.com) may not be entirely indexed by     Google in real-time thereby throwing off your results. Results and inventory can change on a moments notice and you want your search to have the flexibility to reflect that to your visitors.

3. Google will be showing you ads from our competitors while you browse our search results (well, technically Google’s search results of our site). Anti-competitive measures please Google?

4. Publishers do not have full control over the accuracy of results in this scenario. While most sites optimize for Google, search features are usually customized and geared to be performed internally on the site. Discussing usability is a whole other topic.

5. Google has not “mastered” the content of all sites and many site search engines are “homemade” by publishers to deal with their unique data set.

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