Affiliate marketing

SUMMARY: You really can’t beat customer referrals, but measuring the impact of this type of word-of-mouth marketing is notoriously difficult. A subscription-based discount club for college students solved this problem by turning its customers into affiliates through compensated referrals.

Students then promote the service to their friends through email messages and widgets on their social networking profile pages. Thousands of customers have signed up to produce a 12% conversion rate. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: ''Most mid-tier affiliate programs could do much better,'' says Joe Raffetto. Raffetto is a Commission Junction Five-Bar performer as well as a Digital River affiliate network all-star, so he knows what he's talking about.

Discover what he revealed to MarketingSherpa on:

-> How to recruit top affiliates
-> What should be in your email newsletter to affiliates
-> Three Best-of-Breed merchants to emulate

Here's our exclusive Q&A: read the complete article

SUMMARY: "A third of merchants (34%) say that 5 or fewer affiliates are driving 80% of their affiliate sales of sign-ups." "A further 23% say that between 6 and 10 affiliates account for 80% of sales." "More than a quarter of merchants (28%) say their organisations are poor at managing networks and monitoring affiliate activity." view the complete research record

SUMMARY: Even though eBay is one of the Net's top 5 advertisers, they still invest significantly in growing their affiliate program -- which we guess proves no site can get all the traffic it deserves by itself.

In MarketingSherpa's new exclusive interview, eBay's Senior US Affiliate Manager reveals practical tactics on structuring commissions, best publishers to work with and going global: read the complete interview

SUMMARY: Sherpa has brand-new exclusive data from the country’s most-active affiliate marketers with the inside scoop on the top five affiliate networks.

PartnerCentric surveyed its top partners to discover what they think about networks and much more. Includes seven new data charts with information on:
- Who gets the worst customer service rating
- Why technology is so important
- Affiliate marketers feel shorted on attention from networks
- Emergence of Pepperjam read the complete article

By Anne Holland, Founder

The US Supreme Court has ruled that if a company does not have a physical location (a store, office, warehouse, etc.) within a particular state, that state can't require the company to collect and remit sales tax on customers located in that state. For decades now, many state legislators have floated ideas about changing that law because they "lost" millions of dollars in potential tax revenues.

First, the catalog and TV direct response... read the complete blog post