What's working and what's not

We're embarking on a new adventure with internet marketing, eCommerce and analytics. Over the past several months, we've put money, time and effort into lots of different internet programs, advertising, and relationships. Through experimentation and testing, we now have a pretty good handle on what works and what doesn't.

Rather than write a big, long storyline that gives you all the details, we're going to take it one piece at a time.

And, we're going to connect with other people's work along the same lines. Yes, there are still people involved ... not all iMarketing is done by 'bots yet!

So, we'll start you off with an easy evaluation. If you had to come up with 3 of the biggest names in Internet Affliate Marketing, who would you name? I'm sure that if we collected everyone's responses, you could probably count all the different names people mention on the fingers of two hands. We might need one or two toes to complete the big guy list, but that's probably about it.

For brevity, let's narrow it down to 3. You think of your top 3 and I'll think of mine. A friend posted a similar review, but actually named names earlier today. And I see that her content has actually been removed from the AssociatedContent.com website. So, I won't put names in this blog post, but I will summarize the results.

From the top names and their affiliate programs, you can guarantee that those guys (or girls) are making most if not all of the money. In fact a couple of them actually sell their lists to other places and people to market to you as well. Buyer beware ... take it slow on signing up for affiliate programs from the "big names". More often than not, you sign up and they leave you to it. You are on your own. You can spend money to try to get their attention and help, but that is a "dry hole" too.

A couple of positive things to say, though: Try to learn what they do and how they do it. There are lessons in there. One of the bigger names in particular offers very specific, concrete advice on several advertising and marketing techniques ... PPC for example. But, he sells his list (you will get emails from people with names you've never heard of that use his brand) and I'm not 100% certain that there isn't some kind of pirating of commissions going on behind the scenes. I don't have any proof or evidence, other than the law of large numbers. Big traffic increases in buyers (I know because they bought other things) did not yield any corresponding commission increases.

All of this is to say ... be careful when you sign up for Affiliate Programs, especially those from the "big name" folks.

In the spirit of "What's working and What's not", this is our first of several posts. Come back often, read more, and please post your opinion too. We are all still people, and there is great strength in our numbers.

Cheers.

(Note: For more detail on successful programs that do work, visit Creative Data Networks and Analytics web site (click this link).)