I put this little video together this morning after driving my favorite vehicle to work.  Yes that is a two-tone, 1973 Scout II.  Unfortunately it runs about as good as it looks at the moment.  Watch the video and then please share with me your story.  Do you feel like you have a good idea of where your program stands?  Are you ready to tackle all your obstacles and opportunities through the end of the year?

Monday, May 24, 2010
JEBCommerce, a leading affiliate and performance marketing agency, today announces that LiveChime, a leader in innovative chat technology, has selected JEBCommerce to grow and manage their affiliate program on the Linkshare Affiliate Network.

LiveChime is an easy innovative way to capture more leads from your existing online classifieds, auctions, and marketplaces simply by adding your personal link to the places where you already advertise such as Craigslist, eBay, and more. A simple link allows you to engage with customers and build their trust leading up to the sale. Now affiliates are able to promote this technology through the LiveChime affiliate program on Linkshare, managed by the JEBCommerce team.

“We’re excited to be working with JEB Commerce” said Tod Turner, CEO of LiveChime. “LINKShare is a cornerstone of our affiliate marketing initiative and JEB, who was recommended to us by LINKShare, brings a wealth of experience. They understand how the best affiliates work, what motivates them, and how to take care of them. Having JEB on our team ensures we’ll have the most successful program possible for everyone involved.”

Jamie Birch, founder and president of JEBCommerce (an outsourced affiliate management agency), looks to leverage LiveChime’s industry leading live chat technology and JEBCommerce’s experience in the business-to-business, and home/small business sector to grow this program quickly. “We are very excited to be working with LiveChime. Their technology is one of a kind and truly helps business of all types produce more leads and more sales through their online efforts. No longer are these businesses burdened with complicated and expensive chat technology to speak with their potential customers. This brings a truly unique opportunity to affiliates. With high converting and customizable landing pages and creative, this program is sure to be a high performer for our affiliates. We want to encourage affiliates to join the program in the Linkshare Affiliate Network today or contact us at affiliates@livechime.com or 1-800-208-6215.”

JEBCommerce is excited to add LiveChime to its current list of clients that includes philosophy, LuggagePoint.com, Elance, iFloor, 1800Pharmacy.com, Dean & Deluca, OverstockDrugstore, AmyAdele, OfficeFrog, and more.

If you are an affiliate or website owner who is interested in working with the LiveChime affiliate program, please contact JEBCommerce at affiliates@livechime.com.

When Should We Expect Our Affiliate Program to be Profitable?

As outsourced affiliate program managers, or OPM’s, we often get this type of question from new clients and potential clients—and it is a great question. WHEN do you expect to see your program pay for you? The answer, however, isn’t as easy as many would like. There are a few things to take into account, such as:

• Is your’s a retail, lead gen, or business to business affiliate program?
• If it’s retail, are you starting out in your busy period, in your down quarter, or somewhere in between?
• How well known is your brand?
• What network or platform are you launching on?
• Are you launching with ALL the tools your affiliates will need or is this more of a soft launch?
• What is the competitive space like?
• Are your products and services already proven and their demand already demonstrated?
• How long have you been selling products online?
• How long has your site been around and what other channels are you using to sell?
• Are you dedicating resources to this program, such as an in-house affiliate manager or team or an affiliate management agency such as JEBCommerce?

Answers to these questions will help you adequately plan for the performance of your affiliate program. But let’s start with the ballpark figure that you might be looking for right now. Here is our basic rule - you shouldn’t expect true performance and profitability before month 6. That is our general rule. Why? Managing an affiliate program takes time, it is resource intensive, and you are dealing with a relationship based initiative. It takes time to identify partners, contact them, get them excited, and get them optimized.

Basically, at month 6, if your program isn’t meeting expectations and delivering an acceptable percentage of your online business, either big changes need to be made, you are missing a few key points, you need new affiliates, and/or new tools, or this may just not be a great channel for your company.

Six months provides you, your affiliate manager, outsourced affiliate manager enough time to alter strategy, recruit affiliates, test promotions, product merchandise strategies, and more.

Can We See Success in Our Affiliate Program before Month 6?

Definitely! Many of the programs we have managed have produced a healthy percentage of sales or leads by month 3. But by that time, you should be able to identify things that are working and things that aren’t and alter your strategy and/or the execution of it accordingly. If you are around your third month and seeing little to no traction, you or your affiliate management team should be reinforcing or altering your launch strategy.

Programs of unproven companies or products with little brand recognition and companies with no other marketing in other channels, will most likely experience a longer ramp up time as you need to factor in product education and a little brand recognition into the whole process.

Retail programs tend to show results between month 3 and 6. Lead gen can show results right away or, at times, take longer than retail, and business to business programs tend to be more complex and challenging. So some additional time may be necessary.

These aren’t hard and fast rules, but a decent guideline to show you that it does take some time to build a strong and profitable affiliate program. But you should see results, successes, and failures within the first six months and a good affiliate manager will recognize these as you are launching to ensure the quickest success possible.

Many of you have may have already met one of our affiliate managers, Jeff Nilges, at Affiliate Summit West last month, but I would like to formally introduce you to him. Jeff joined JEBCommerce in spring of 2009 as an intern and after showing great potential; he was promoted to affiliate manager. His strong background in social media and web development make him a valuable asset to our team. He was extremely helpful with my transfer from PC to Mac.

He hit the ground the running by successfully growing the OverstockDrugstore and Luggagepoint affiliate programs to record sales. A focus on merchandising as well as an aggressive approach to recruiting through building key partnerships has been critical to the success of the programs Jeff manages. Additionally he manages iFloor and has assisted in recruiting and strategy on our other accounts including drop.io and doba.

I recently sat down with Jeff for an interview to get his thoughts on the recent Affiliate Summit West Conference and to get to know him better. Check out the video below:

I realize I may be partial, but Jeff is a rising star here at JEBCommerce and he’s definitely someone to keep an eye on throughout 2010. Follow Jeff on Twitter at: @jnil.

Stephen at our booths at CJU Expo

Last week I went to CJU in Santa Barbara with our owner and CEO Jamie Birch. This was my first trip to CJU and the event certainly lived up to all of the hype.  This was an exciting conference since it was my first since accepting a full time position with JEBCommerce.

If you were there, you may have noticed that we take a different approach to these conferences by inviting our clients to join us.  We do this for a couple of reasons; it allows us to spend more time with them and they are also able to meet the publishers that promote their products and services.  This increased level of transparency has paid off for us in strengthening our partnerships.

Jamie and I went to CJU with several goals:

• Meet new publishers and potential partners
• Meet with our current partners to continue to grow these relationships
• Spend more time with merchants that joined us at the event and introduce them to our affiliate partners
• Look for new potential merchants

In addition to a full slate of meetings, we also hosted four of our merchants, Ned from 6pm, Brandon from Doba, Sumit from Luggagepoint.com and Steve from drop.io. We found that our affiliates really enjoy meeting our merchants and we really enjoy hanging out with them.

Brandon from Doba talking with mycoupons

Tuesday afternoon Sumit hosted his table for Luggagepoint.com and Brandon hosted Doba’s table at the CJU Expo. This was a great networking event and we even gave away some luggage courtesy of Luggagepoint. We were excited to see some of our current publishers as well as meet some new ones that have a lot of potential to do well for us.

After the CJU Expo, we hopped on buses and headed over to the Dell Welcome reception where we enjoyed some delicious appetizers and drinks while continuing to network. Pictured below on the right is Steve from drop.io giving a brief demonstration on the stop to TrialPay. Who needs wifi when you have an iPhone and a Mac?

Steve from drop.io walking Trial Pay through a drop.io presentation

Wednesday started interestingly enough when  Jamie woke up and realized he had no voice.  No matter how many times I told him to stop talking, he just kept on talking.  He was a real trooper.  Too bad Jamie doesn’t have an iPhone or he could’ve just used the “bump” app to network.  (A special thanks to Sumit from Luggagepoint for showing off this really cool app).  In fact, I suggested a 5 minute Bump networking session for CJU 2010.

We had a busy day full of sessions and meetings. Sumit, Brandon and I split up and covered some ground at CJU Connect, this was a unique networking opportunity where the publishers had tables and we came to them. I think Brandon and Sumit would agree that we had some very fruitful meetings during this event. The CJYou Awards Dinner was a classy event, great food and excellent conversations.  After dinner it was time to relax at the Cocktail Party at Tonic in downtown Santa Barbara.

With a full agenda of goals for this event, we wanted to be as efficient as possible. Therefore we created a special drop using one of our merchants, drop.io, to help us stay organized for this event. This drop allowed us to access our list of potential targets at anytime during the event. We also utilized the voice mail feature to leave voice notes after every meeting we had to make sure we didn’t forgot any action/follow up items. This proved to be a vital asset to the success of this event for us.

Sumit from Luggagepoint and I meeting with Marie from CJ

Thursday we wrapped up the event with a few meetings and lunch with our great team at Commission Junction. Thanks to Marie and Laura for treating us to lunch. This event wouldn’t have been as successful if it weren’t for the hard work of Marie and Laura who spent their days tracking down affiliates on our target list and introducing them to us. We are fortunate to have such a great account team at Commission Junction.

I came away very impressed from the event and anxious to follow up with many new publishers and old friends I met at the event.  This year’s event was a great success for us and we are definitely looking forward to CJU 2o10.

Here at JEBCommerce we have been blessed by so many amazing clients.  We are fortunate to work with great partners such as Ned Farra of Zappos.  Ned recently gave us the following audio testimonial.  We hope that it helps potential partners, both affiliate and client, get a good feel for who we are and how we can help you.

Thank you Ned for the many kind words.  We truly appreciate your sentiments and your continued partnership!

“I have worked with Jamie and JEBCommerce for many years now and each and every program he has been a part of has been successful for us. I truly believe his excellent understanding of how to work with affiliates and communicating their value to the merchants has played a great role. So often affiliate managers just put their programs on auto-pilot and are not engaging whereas Jamie and JEBCommerce are the complete opposite always being proactive and offering ways to help improve our succes.”

–Christian Gordun (CEO/Founder of CouponCraze.com)

Thank you Christian!  You have always been an outstanding partner and we appreciate your kind words!

10 Reasons to Hire An Outsourced Affiliate Program Management Company:

At JEBCommerce we get this question quite often.  We do include a run down of this answer in every presentation we give, but we felt it would provide more utility in a PDF download you can read at any time.  The 10 Reasons to Hire an  OPM (outsourced program manager), as they are commonly called, is below and available for download at your convenience.

Read about the cost savings, increased sales and profitability performance, exposure to a larger group of affiliates and more by downloading our PDF below.

10 Reasons to Hire and Outsourced Affiliate Program Management Company (PDF Download)

JEBCommerce has been working closely with the Zappos team on their affiliate program for some time now. With both excitement and pride, JEBCommerce would like to announce that, in conjuntion with Ned Farra and his team, we are now managing the 6pm.com affiliate program! 6pm.com is your online source for shoes, apparel, and accessories. At 6pm.com, you’ll find great deals on all of your fashion needs at their one-stop shop. From shoes & accessories for an evening out, or gear for jogging, 6pm.com carries what you need for any occasion.

6pm.com is a great site and a great affiliate program. Ned Farra had this to say about the new partnership: “JEB Commerce brings a nice blend of experience and expertise to the table that helps develop and execute strategies to grow our affiliate program. We are excited to have the JEBCommerce team helping us grow the 6pm program.”

The 6pm.com affiliate program is available in Commission Junction. The commission rate is 7% with 120 cookie days. The big plus here is that if you are an affiliate of Zappos and 6pm, you can feel free to send traffic to both sites, knowing that if a user clicks over to the other, you’ll get your comission.

If you haven’t joined this program yet, please login to CJ and apply today. 6pm has almost daily sales and promotions on the site. To keep you up to date as ahead of time as possible, we have launched 6pm on NewsForAffiliates.com. You can read more about the 6pm affiliate program here.

f you have any questions about the program don’t hesitate to contact me directly through the avenues below or at associates@6pm.com.

Jamie Birch
JEBCommerce
208-635-5164
jamie@jebcommerce.com
www.jebcommerce.com

AOLIM JamieBComm

www.newsforaffiliates.com

I’m on Oovoo! Reach me at JamieJEBCommerce for a video chat.

How does your business, your affiliate site, your service organization fit in with your competitors?

Whether you are a local restaurant, like in the video below, or you run a niche retail site, knowing how you fit in with your competitors can be the difference between throwing money down a pit and reaping the rewards of a successful business.

Watch the video below from Kitchen Nightmares.  In the video, the owners of the restaurant never looked at their business compared to what else was available within a few blocks on either side of them.  When they did focus on that for a moment, they saw what their customers needed that wasn’t being served.

Start at about 2:18 into this video:

When was the last time you evaluated yourself compared to the competition?  What assumptions have you been running on that are no longer valid?  What have you changed in your business after doing a thorough competitive analysis?