Will you bring your affiliate income to the next level by promoting PJN affiliate programs?

More on that shortly, but rather than repeat the information that other bloggers have highlighted, you can read write-ups and view videos at:

• Shawn Collins’ Pepperjam Network intro and video
• David Lewis’ Revenews preview/review of PJN

Having been an early tester for PJN since its beta stage, I’ve seen the fledgling network (with a great pedigree) go through its early development stages, but the questions for most affiliates is: Does it deliver on it’s promise of an “Affiliate Marketing 2.0″ network?

With about 100 merchants under its belt and have recruited a number of star Super Affiliates to promote its programs, Pepperjam will be focusing on building up its merchant and affiliate support and promotion efforts in the coming months. You can likewise expect to see an impressive booth at the Affiliate Summit West next month.

I’ve spoken to Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director Robyn Jones a number of times about the affiliate programs they’ve managed and you can see many of these programs, previously listed at Commission Junction and the other major networks now offered on PJN.

I have faced a number of issues with affiliate cookies not lodging correctly on some of the major networks (with sometimes less than enthusiastic support in pursuing these lost sales), and PJN’s affiliated-focused approach means that you have a higher chance of ensuring that your marketing efforts are accurately compensated. (eg. less “lost” sales).

The panel to search for merchant programs and get affiliate links is similar to other tier-1 affiliate networks, as is the ability to tag Sub IDs to your links for better tracking.

I believe the design of the program has a lot to do with Pepperjam head honcho’s experience as a PPC marketer and incorporates a number of PPC-friendly tracking and analytics features.

One of the interesting features of PJN is the ability to create a customized widget, known as pepperjamADS.

Smarter and more sophisticated affiliates will be able to select and rotate merchants and create a changing widget on their blogs or content sites.

Think of a more user-controlled Google adsense block on your sites, featuring merchants you select. The performance-based nature (pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale) of the payouts means your potential return on investment (ROI) will be at least 10 times higher than what you might expect from a comparable contextual pay-per-click advertising program.

Note: This payout is only going to give you these returns if you spend some time doing appropriate strategic marketing to match appropriate offers to your traffic profile, rather than the “fire-and-forget” nature of Google Adsense, AdBrite, Yahoo Search Marketing or other contextual type ads.

In my eyes, Pepperjam has been really strong in recruiting merchants in the lifestyle/fashion niche, such as fashion lines from Kimora Simmons (of BabyPhat Fashion/America’s Next Top Model fame), Nelly, Beyone’s Dereon and other lines.

If you’re running a mass entertainment/lifestyle website, you’ll have ample tools at your fingertips to monetize effectively.

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What I’m interested in looking at will be the included and constantly evolving datafeed capabilites form the merchants. If you’ve worked with XML datafeeds, you’ll know that they’re not the easiest data to work with, unless you’re using a script to process the data, or a service provider like Asif Malik’s GoldenCan.

So it’ll be interesting to see how smart affiliates are going to create shopping and catalog sites from the datafeeds.

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Additionally, PJN has an education/resources area, for new affiliates.

This is a great idea and something I had mentioned would be useful to include some time back:

At the moment it’s mainly outgoing links to blogs, forums and paid affiliate training (like Affiliate Classroom).

Over time, it’ll be great to see some of the PJ team develop in-house training resources because I think the “software” training materials are probably just as important, if not more important than the “hardware” feed generators, widget code and analytics.

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The Bottomline: Having a new affiliate network entrant always means more choice for affiliate marketers, and the test and mettle of the network will be proven as affiliates promote the programs and check that leads and sales are being tracked accurately.

Also with PJN entering the arena, it means that sales going through their system will go past adware detectors, like the ones built into Windows and third party adware software like Spybot and AdAware which have flagged tracking cookies from the major affiliate networks as “potential security threats”.

If you are in a consumer-related niche, eg lifestyle, entertainment, fashion, you’d want to monetize your traffic more effectively with PJN’s merchants as it’s going to give you a higher ROI compared to contextually-targeted advertising systems.

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If any, one grouse I have with Pepperjam’s in-house affiliate recruiting system (to recruit sub-affiliates) is that it’s a flat $5 payout per lead, unlike the typical 2% – 4% commission that a number of the other networks are paying out.

Granted it does go up to $7 per signup once you hit a high number of sub-affiliates, but it’ll be nice to have a recurring overriding commission to provide an incentive to groom those you recruit.

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To sign up for PepperjamNetwork, check out:

–> The PepperjamNetwork Affiliate Network

Comments

You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.

It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).

Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.

With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.

This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to a demographic/psychographic-based focus.

Just imagine BoomJ providing a variety of finance-related, health-related, biz op-related offers and you can see that the potential for revenue multiplication is very high.

It goes beyond providing an offer, to building a relationship, and that’s where the opportunities show themselves.

WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller has mentioned the start of the Niche Network Era. Some might say it’s a revolution, but perhaps it’s more an evolution of the social community idea kicked off by the behemoths like MySpace and Facebook, into something that’s financially sustainable and self-sufficient.

It’s more than just collecting warm bodies, it’s turning into a real business.

Comments

Details about the deal are slim.  According to a press release, “Pepperjam … has selected DoubleClick’s integrated DART platform to meet the digital marketing needs of Pepperjam and its clients.”

And that’s all good and well, but it may leave some of you wondering what, exactly Pepperjam is.  The job of describing – or at least giving you an idea of – the company may be best left to Jason Bigler, DoubleClick’s vice president of product management.  “Pepperjam is growing tremendously, adding new clients each week and we are thrilled that they have decided to streamline their ad management with DoubleClick,” said Bigler in a statement.

He went on to describe Pepperjam’s work as a series of “world-class advertising campaigns that produce great results and allow Pepperjam to achieve operational excellence.”

DoubleClick and Pepperjam should be able work together – and hopefully achieve still more of that “operational excellence” – without upsetting any of the FTC powers-that-be.  On Pepperjam’s blog, Kris Jones, the CEO and president of the company, writes, “Truth is we’ve been in negotiations with Doubleclick dating back before Google’s $3.1 Billion acquisition.”

There’s been no word from the Googleplex, but, if Google was unaware of these dealings, that information had to come as good news.  I’m sure the search engine giant doesn’t, on the whole, mind the deal between DoubleClick and Pepperjam, either.

The price tag for elite retreat definitely gives meaning to it being elite but my goal is to show people the worth behind a convention like this. Yes it cost’s around 5 grand to go to this convention but you have to look at what you are getting for this price. You are literally getting one on one consulting with industry leaders. Lets break it down like this.

Plain ticket to San Fransisco: $434
Ticket to Elite Retreat: $4,950
Getting to talk to industry leaders in a one on one basis: Priceless

Thanks mastercard

So I am conducting a series of interview’s with the speakers at elite retreat and trying to get a better understanding at what attendees can expect from elite retreat. So far I have interviewed Lee Dodd (forum Expert) and Kris Jones (SEO,SEM, and much more expert at pepperjam). Next on the list is Aaron Walls, Neil Patel and founder Jeremy Schoemaker.

Be sure to check out the interview’s over at lunarpages.

Kris Jones – Elite Retreat Interview
Lee Dodd – Elite Retreat Interview

Comments

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About the Author

My name is Joe Whyte and I have been doing SEO/SEM for over 5 years now. I have worked with fortune 1000 companies helping them to market their products online, improve search engine rankings, increase conversions and draw viable, targeted traffic to my clients sites.

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