Adsmarket Returns from ASE09 – Where’s My T-shirt?

I apologize for the lengthy hiatus. What can I say? It was August, hot, and the summer holiday opps beckon to all of us! But now we are back to the blog, and with our return, a few words about Affiliate Summit East, which rocked New York City from August 9-11.

I think it’s important to mention that the details recounted here will be recollected through the fog of a long flight from New York, and after what felt like 5 days of non-stop networking (read: partying at AMAZING NYC locales). We’ve got all our pictures on Flickr, and you can catch them here or by using our handy blog toolbar (click the tiny butterfly icon to see a slideshow).

Gabi Cohen, Adsmarket’s VP of Media, had this to say about ASE09:
“We had the great opportunity to meet publishers who understand the potential that lies outside the US, want to increase their non-US revenue, and who were looking for international offers outside the usual verticals and hadn’t yet found the right partner for that. Now they understand that we are the right partner to expand with."

Highlights from ASE from Maor Sadra, regular blog contributor and Director of Sales:
"My first day as a sales team member at an affiliate convention was total culture shock. We went to the aptly named "meet market", which was was boisterously loud. Everyone was dressed casually, and blatantly stared at each other’s, ahem, name tags to identify Purple (Affiliate), Red (Network), Orange (Merchant) or Green (Agency). I couldn’t walk 2 feet without someone stopping me to check my tag. I felt rather violated…

After about an hour of trying to walk around, I got the hang of things and started chatting up with random people within the hall, and that was the amazing part. There were so many professional people from all around the world, all coming to interact and find opportunities, and people I’ve been working with over email suddenly got a face.

For Days 2 and 3, we had a booth at the main hall. I pre-scheduled most of my meetings, so I didn’t spend a lot of time at the booth itself, which turned out to be a mistake. There was a lot of companies that came up to our booth which I did not expect to meet there…I finished 3 boxes of business cards within 2 days!

A couple of things I learned in ASE:

• The more years you are in this industry, the more you are reminded that the world is very small. Many are the same people you worked with in the past, with different titles and company logos.
• When you pack for Affiliate Summit, pack a LOT of energy drinks. You’re going to need it!
• New York Ice Cream Floats are way too sweet than what they should be.

Last thing I’ll say is: See You in Vegas for Affiliate Summit West!!!"

To tweet or not to tweet, and what to tweet?

We at Adsmarket are active tweeters. We tweet to each other, we tweet to the twitterverse, we tweet about the importance of a daily cup of coffee and link to pictures of us goofing around at conventions, and I admit that we tweet our registration pages for those who aren’t yet part of the Adsmarket family. We know how important Twitter is as a platform for affiliate marketers, so we try to learn as much about it as we can. Stay tuned to our Twitter account, actually, for some cool improvements, thanks to CoTweet.

Anyway, it’s cool and all to tweet, and to use the myriad of fun applications that make Twitter more functional and easy to use, like Twhirl, TweetDeck, and the rest. But sometimes I sit down and am totally stumped about what to say! It’s only 140 characters, but I am so intimidated by those that we follow who are dang good at getting something down that grabs my attention!
So, today I came upon an article by Joel Comm about the 14 types of tweets. And it has solved my twitter woes, at least for today. If ever I am in doubt about what to tweet, I can go to this list for reference and hopefully The Spirit of Twitter will inspire me to tweet with magnificence. Or not.
For those who have this problem: what the heck do I tweet?, This article is a goldmine.

In the next 2 weeks, we will reveal some of our TwitterTeam members, bringing you one step further into the Adsmarket Social Scene!

For now, as the person in charge of Adsmarket’s social media efforts, I happily invite you to follow me.

King of the Obvious – A Tip for More Conversions

My name is Maor Sadra, Director of Sales at Adsmarket. This is my first (of many) blog posts to the Adsmarket blog. I welcome any comments you have!

I’ve been working in online advertising for the past 7 years, and while I always think that I know enough to get around in this dynamic industry, I always find that sometimes it’s good to listen to the people around me who may come up with the best “King of the Obvious” solution.

“King of the Obvious” is a term set by one of my former managers. This manager had a lot of experience in online advertising, but no technical experience whatsoever and needed some help with certain accounts.
Being young (oh, the hunger of youth!), tech-oriented and motivated to show that my technical skills can bridge any issue, I took on projects with Advertisers which included some programming.

One sunny day I received a spec for a new campaign that we were going to launch. My mind started all the geeky wheels in motion and I brain-stormed with myself the entire day trying to figure out how to setup this campaign.
If you’ve ever banged your head on the table trying to figure out how to solve something, you know exactly how I felt that day. And as you probably know, the banging doesn’t help.

After a long day of misery, I told my manager: “I can’t find any way of doing it…”.
He didn’t react at first, just looked at me strangely and asked: “Why are you thinking of the longest route from A to B when A is only 1 centimeter away from B?”
I was amazed. It was just like in Star Wars: Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is trying to… okay, whoa, I’m showing my geek colors a little too much. Let’s just say that because I was overthinking it, I had turned a simple solution into a very complex riddle that I was unable to solve.

When I asked my manager, “Why didn’t I see that?!” he explained: “Sometimes you need to take a step back to become King of the Obvious.”

When I think of this case, I always remember a gem of advice for conversion funnels from Jared M. Spool about how a small change in a web form helped an eCommerce company increase their revenues by $300,000,000 in the first year. It’s explained in this famous article that after a few weeks of learning the user flow of the site, a small repositioning of the “proceed to checkout” button made such a huge improvement in the conversion funnel that it completely changed the user experience and led to many many more conversions.
The change itself? Allowing users to proceed to checkout without creating an account with the eCommerce site. We can all agree that allowing users to create an account would be helpful in the long term, allowing them make their purchase faster; however, let’s look at it from the customer’s perspective. When you go to a store and you want to buy a phone, or anything for that matter, do you want to enter a long term relationship with the store clerk, or do you want to select it, pay for it and go on with your life?

My tip for the day is: When you build your landing page, sometime you think of all the information you want from your users when asking them to sign up. Take a step back, become the King and think – what information does the customer want to give me, and do I really NEED all this other information? A clear, short registration form is the key to success with user retention.

King of the Obvious. Think about it.

Cheers,
Maor Sadra (maor.s@adsmarket.com)
Director of Sales

The New and Improved Adsmarket!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new website, which we think shows our true nature (we all like to pretend we are superheros at some point in our lives, don’t deny it). 

The new Adsmarket site is easy to navigate, answers key questions that potential partners might have about our services, and expresses our “corporate” personality ( young-ish, energetic, in-the-know and driven, with a sense of humor!).

We’re easier to spot too!  Look for our superhero (we call him The Affiliator) online, at conventions, tradeshows, and in our newsletter!