5 Star Affiliate Blogs

There was controversy recently about Amazon refusing to pay commission on Twitter links. This piece retracts that and was written with the help of Amazon as a GUIDE to social media marketing for affiliates and lays out the ground rules that they assume will also be acceptable for most other affiliate programs, although you should always check each program’s TOS.

Just discovered a slick, free and easy way to embed overlay ads with live links onto YouTube videos. Let’s say for instance one of your merchants has a video demo on YouTube. You can embed the YouTube video on your site and have a small ad with a link to the merchant right on top of the video.

Do you find yourself so scattered on so many projects you aren’t making much progress on anything? Or are you just getting started and wondering whether to diversify and start a bunch of mini sites or to just focus on one niche?

Loren Baker just launched a new video sharing community for Internet marketers today called IMBroadcast.com. So now you have an option to get your videos in front of SEOs and other marketers instead of just being buried on YouTube

Did you know you can get your site featured on major news sites like CNN, CNET, USA Today. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the blogosphere and I’m going to reveal it now.
All done with FREE Web 2.0 sites

RU Addicted to Social Media? I’m not as bad as some of the AM peeps I follow on Twitter. I only scored a 32%, so I’m not hopelessly addicted yet! How about U? Take the quiz then come back and tell us how you scored! Betting Sam, Jim and Peter score BIG!

Buy.com just announced new Buy TV Video Widgets for affiliates. The widgets use the popular QOOF video platform and allow affiliates to feature videos of the hottest products in a very small space. The video widgets self-update daily with top sellers. Here’s a sample video

If you are planning to do PPC for the Holidays – according to Google TODAY is the day to begin creation of your Holiday PPC campaigns. This video webinar will help you make the most of Google AdWords advertising for the upcoming holiday season.

The Affiliate piece of the Make-A-Video is complete and ready for use. As an Affiliate, you can now create and generate your own video creatives, and link them to multiple different Merchants throughout the video through the use of cue points.

Information Week had a good article about the affiliate marketing session at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Always great to see our industry get positive play in mainstream media. I blogged earlier about

The affiliate widget shows up to 10 products without taking up much real estate. If you select vertical placement which would work well for sidebars, it’s called a Ferris Wheel and that’s just how it moves. Hope consumers like it and it helps affiliates get some good conversions.

LinkConnector’s Widget technology makes it simple to offer product content on blogs and social networks. Bloggers. Facebook, and MySpace users can now provide revenue-producing product content on their pages and participate in the growing world of affiliate marketing.

I’m happy that the event organizers recognize affiliate marketing as part of the Web 2.0 mix, so I wanted to be sure to share the info with 5 Star readers. Sam, Lisa, Stephanie… will be discussing responsible affiliate marketing strategies in a web2.0 world.

The hottest thing going at Affiliate Summit West 2008 was the new widget being offered by Qoof.com. This revolutionary widget combines the power of video ads with affiliate tracking codes. This widget is poised to take affiliate marketing by storm

Widget advertising is a growing trend, especially within social networks. According to eMarketer, 22 percent of marketers surveyed used widgets as a social media marketing application last year. They predict that this year, the number of marketers who plan to use widgets will double to 47 percent

Everyone knows video marketing is hot, but if affiliates want to use it they have to use a 3rd party tool to try to embed their affiliate ID to get credit for sales they send the merchant. To my knowledge none of the affiliate networks have come up with a seamless solution – that is [...]

New Video Widget allows you to share your new or existing video, overlay product ads/links – with your affiliate link embedded. Viral video embed feature means people can grab your video, show on their site and you get the commish!

Seth Godin and the Grok – These two will offer insights into Web 2.O and beyond. They have both totally revolutionized the way people think about marketing and will share their insights with our listeners. This is the just the beginning of many special events with industry icons on our network…so stay tuned for more to come!

Think eBay user-powered classified ads on Facebook with user-defined affiliate commission built in. An affiliate widget for the masses! No expensive affiliate program, no affiliate manager needed – just user2user affiliate marketing. BRILLIANT!

It’s a video marketplace that makes it easy for potential advertisers to select from and customize professionally produced video to create their own custom ads. Think of it like a high quality customizable video template store. No YouTube crap – PRO videos. Pretty cool. Very cost effective!