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Affiliate Ball NYC 2012 at Affiliate Summit!

Darren Blatt, Promotor & Organizer of Affiliate Ball contacted AdHustler.com with the inside scoop.  Here is the press release!

Affiliate Ball New York ASE signs a Beastie Boy, Ice-T & Coco

There is big news and a lot of hype swirling around the Affiliate Ball.  Neverblue stepped up their marketing game by securing the “title” sponsorship for this event and will now have the appropriate nomenclature of “Neverblue Presents The Affiliate Ball”.

Team Neverblue released the following statement, “Neverblue is very excited to announce that we are the Title Sponsor for Affiliate Ball happening on August 13th. This will be THE best party in town and Ice & Coco with Mix Master Mike will be a huge hit! We look forward to entertaining the massive affiliate base that is attending Affiliate Summit East and look forward to meeting all of you at this legendary party. “

Darren Blatt, promoter and organizer of the Affiliate Ball, says he wanted the perfect New York party.  This year’s party is expected to have over 2,500 invited guests of the Affiliate Summit, as it is THE official party on Monday night.  Blatt changed venues so that the VIP’s can experience an outdoor, rooftop VIP area which can support over 500 of the industry’s movers and shakers.  The VIP area will have a “hipster orchestra” featuring the music of:

Nirvana, The Strokes, Black Keys and more.

Keeping the New York vibe in tact again this year, the Affiliate Ball has retained MixMaster Mike, the legendary DJ of the Beastie Boys to perform over a 90 minute set.  As always you can be assured that the Ball will have lots of surprise guests. Last years party was featured on TMZ  when hip hop legends Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Caz and Dougie Fresh jumped on stage to perform.

Ice T and Coco have one of the biggest shows on cable TV right now.  Ice T is also currently starring in another show on NBC, “Law And Order”.

“Ice has hosted a couple of my events years ago.  Not only is he a consummate professional, he’s a very cool person. We plan on having Ice and his beautiful wife, Coco, walking around the crowd to shake hands, take pictures with our guests, and host the entire night on stage. Not only are they hosting the party, but they will be PARTYING with us all night long!”

You can RSVP now for this legendary event on their website, http://affiliateball.com/registration.html

This Affiliate Ball is always happy to welcome more sponsors on board.  If interested, please email info@affiliateball.com

Other early bird sponsors include:  PeerFly, SellHealth, EDK Innovations, ProfitKingsMedia, Scrubkit & Critical.net

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It’s coming!  Affiliate Summit East 2012 NYC is right around the corner.  Want to see the Ad Hustler speak about Local Lead Gen?  Well then, vote for my session: Advanced Local Lead Gen Strategies.  If Affiliate Summit decides they want this session i’ll try to keep it light, entertaining and most importantly educational.

See You All There!

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Talk radio has always been one of my favorite entertainment mediums.  I went to school for Radio Production/On Air Personality and even had a pretty popular online radio show for a while.  When i’m not listening to Sirius, I tend to be listening to podcasts because it doesn’t kill my monthly bandwidth and there are some really entertaining and free podcasts.  One of my favorite has always been the Adam Carolla Show.  Adam Carolla’s podcast rivals any Sirius or Broadcast radio show entertainment wise.  It also has far less commercials then Broadcast or Sirius talk shows and it’s FREE!  Recently. Adam Carolla’s broadcast network “Ace Broadcast Network” made a deal with Penn Jillette and gave him his own free podcast as well.  Also a good show.

Both shows have something in common that we as affiliate marketers may find interesting.  Both shows use affiliate marketing as a primary method of monetizing their content.  How you may ask do they do this?

Throughout the shows the hosts remind the listeners that if they are going to be buying something online to first go to their websites and click the Amazon banner.  They explain that if you do this, it will cost you as the listener nothing more to buy the items you were going to buy anyway and that they as the hosts get a small percentage of the sale.  By doing this you support the show and they make enough money to make it worthwhile distributing their shows for free.  Penn Jillette even takes it a step further by asking you to clear your cookies first.

I think that this is freakin’ genius.  Both personalities are driving traffic to affiliate links using an offline medium.  They spare you from hearing tons of commercials during their shows by asking that you do something you were going to do anyway; buy something online.  This is the next generation of affiliate marketing and content monetization and these two guys are leading the way.  I think this is smart for a variety of reasons.  First, as small shows, they don’t have to have sales teams to land them commercials in order to make money off their shows.  They just need an Amazon Associates account.  Second, you let your listeners show support for the show in a way that doesn’t cost them anything extra and get the audience involved in keeping the show going.  My guess is that this leads to a more loyal audience since they feel they are keeping the show afloat.

Now, the question that can be asked is does Amazon like this?  I have no idea if they have a deal with Amazon beyond the standard associates program but I can’t see Amazon NOT liking this.  Amazon get’s free exposure on extremely popular podcasts and only have to pay a percentage of the sale.  Yea, Amazon may have made those sales anyway but they still get advertising.

I like what Adam Carolla & Penn Jillette are doing and I think they are leaders in creating free content and monetizing it themselves.  I bet they can make even more money with creative ideas like a coupon website called PennsCoupons.com or a deals website like Adamsdeals.com where they leverage 100′s of affiliate programs to make even higher commissions then what the Amazon Associates program pays.  If you guys need ideas, hit me up!

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Whatup my peeps?

Ad Hustler is back with a pretty interesting case study.

The Backstory

I have a local client (local traffic but located halfway across the country from where I am) who I’m running a campaign for.  The client is a national chain but locally franchise owned.  For this reason, we were unable to create a landing page and track all of the leads that the client was getting because corporate requires that the franchise owner uses the main corporate domain for all advertising purposes.  This ruled out traditional lead gen type pricing so they opted to hire me on a retainer.  Although I could easily just collect their money from now until eternity, I like to be able to offer true results.  I pride myself on it.  Local businesses are usually very focused on phone calls so this presented a bit of a problem since I had no way of editing the corporate site to replace the phone number with a tracking number of my own.  I decided to use Google Adwords Call Extensions, just to see if by adding the phone number using a call extension gave me any trackable results whatsoever.

The Case Study

This case study doesn’t focus on the entire campaign that I am running for the client.  What it focuses on is how the call extensions performed as a trackable metric for an otherwise untrackable campaign.  Although the call extension is able to run with every ad in my account, Google picks and chooses when it actually shows the call extension to a searcher.  Below you will find 2 weeks worth of stats for only ads that displayed WITH the call extension and my results.

Impressions: 4,970
Clicks: 294
Click Through Rate: 5.92%
Avg CPC: $0.46
Cost: $135.24
Trackable Phone Calls: 60

REMEMBER: THIS is only phone calls that occur BEFORE the click, not once they land on the website which is bound to be plentiful as well.

Something interesting to note here is that Google is supposed to track how many calls your receive if someone click-to-calls and track those within your account.  They track me as zero click-to-calls, hence each phone call I recieved actually converted off of a FREE impression, rather than a PAID click.

Another thing to note is that these phone calls are CHEAP.  The average call is costing only $2.25.  If you were selling these on a per-lead basis they could be quite profitable.

Conclusion

If you are running a local lead gen campaign DO NOT FORGET AD EXTENSIONS.  Let me repeat: DO NOT FORGET AD EXTENSIONS!  Not only can you get results like this off of very little spend but they make your ad stand out from the rest, driving up click through rate and driving down cost per click.  If you are using a landing page and tracking all the calls to charge on a per lead basis, you can add these ad extension phone calls onto your reports and create better results for the client and more monies in your pocket.

Anyone else have experience with ad extensions?  Please Share!

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I’m often working on a lot of projects at one time.  I’ve been asked how I manage multiple projects.  Now, i’m not saying that i’m the BEST at managing time.  I can get just as distracted as the next guy but this is my typical process.

I use a handwritten list of things that need to be done.  The list has two columns.  Status & Task.  Once the task is completed I put an X in the status column and highlight the item.  The goal is to have the whole page highlighted by the end of the day.  At the bottom of the list I have 3 grey rows for urgent items.  I print out 30 days worth of task lists so I can assign things to certain days.

Tips:

• Work on one thing at a time.  Try NOT to multitask.  I find when I work on one thing at a time I tend to get more done.
• Close all windows on your computer that you aren’t using.  Open windows make me more easily distracted.
• Keep your workspace clean.  I get more done with a clean desk and a clean desktop.
• Don’t listen to music.  I tend to get more done in silence.
• Get the annoying tasks that you want to procrastinate on done first.  It helps motivate you to get through your whole task list.
• Avoid sites you DON’T need to be on to get the job done.  Designate a certian amount of time to BSing on the sites you love.

Have anything to add?  Share in the comments!

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