We’re excited to announce that PoachMark has officially launched. With over 200 affiliate programs monitored, we’re confident that PoachMark meets the robustness standards that we’ve established internally for this milestone.
PoachMark is now monitoring the affiliate programs of top 5 e-commerce merchants and top 5 Internet advertisers along with niche online retailers. We think Stephen [...]

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Amazon sent an email to all its affiliates this morning announcing a change in its paid search policy for affiliates – Affiliates will no longer be allowed to direct link to Amazon.
The issue of whether search affiliates add to the bottom line is a hotly debated one in affiliate marketing. In our opinion, the [...]

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I’ll be out at Affiliate Summit Sun-Tues. If you are interested in meeting up, send me a note (http://www.brandverity.com/contact/) or twitter @brandverity

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Sarah Bird at SEOMoz put together an excellent summary of the DSW vs. Zappos case.  DSW sued Zappos because one of Zappo’s affiliates created organic pages that targeted DSW terms, used DSW TMs in the domain names, used DSW images, but linked to Zappos pages (through CJ).
The initial Complaint was denied, however the judge gave [...]

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I sat in on a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketing Association (RMAMA) and presented an overview of BrandVerity and how an affiliate manager should use the service.  The meeting consisted of a group of merchants OPMs and interested third parties.
The meeting was held at 1-800-CONTACTS and we were all treated to a fantastic [...]

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I spoke on the Affiliate PPC Issues panel Tuesday at Pubcon with Jon Kelly and Adam Jewel.  I touched on a number of proven strategies that we’ve seen our clients utilize to build strong affiliate PPC policies and procedures. My slides are here.  I think I may have gone a little bit far in avoiding [...]

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Tony Wright has an excellent post up at SearchEngineLand on establishing search marketing rules for working with franchise organizations.  Since affiliates are in some ways franchisees (and plenty of ways not), some of his guidelines are quite useful.  He provides three rules:

A heavy hand at the beginning saves heartache down the road. Set your [...]

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We’ve gotten a number of questions about PoachMark identify affiliate ads.  While some of our approach is proprietary, it is one major thing that we do that differentiates us from our competition.
We use a combination of automated and manual techniques to determine if an advertiser is also an affiliate:

Examine and follow links in Search Ads: [...]

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Jeremy Shoemaker pointed out this thread on Digital Point where an affiliate manager requested access to an affiliate’s AdWords account.
The affiliate manager was trying to determine if the affiliate had violated the keyword policies of the merchant.  Obviously, there is a lot of sensitive data in there and affiliates should be extremely reluctant to provide [...]

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Trademark use management remains one of the greater challenges for brands that maintain affiliate programs. Most of the sessions that I’ve been to so far touch on trademarks and their use/abuse at some point over the course of their talk.
Andy Rodriguez touched on setting and monitoring policies for keyword bidding in his Sunday session on [...]

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