Using the internet as a way to help you build your business, whether it’s an online or offline business, is an extremely cost effective technique. When it comes to mass email marketing you can literally reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers all with the click of a button and with very little overhead (just the price of your internet connection and website hosting costs).

The low cost of this type of advertisement had a downside, companies started sending out millions of messages to unsuspecting email recipients who then started complaining about spam – unsolicited bulk commercial emails.

The rocketing number of spam emails that were being sent out created a back lash from the public which eventually led to new laws to prevent the abuse of the email message system, the CAN SPAM laws. These laws basically state that you can’t send out a lot of emails to random email addresses.

In order to be in compliance with the law, and not be accused of spamming, there are a few things you need to do:

1. Your email message must have an accurate ‘from’ heading where you put in your name or the name of your company.

2. The subject line on your email must be accurate and relate to the actual content of your email.

3. As the sender you must provide an actual physical address for you or your company.

4. Make sure to clearly label your email if it contains adult content.

5. You cannot have a false header on your email.

6. You must provide a clear, and free, link for the recipient to ‘un-scubscribe’ and if they click on that link they should immediately be removed from your email list and you should never send them another email.

7. Having an ‘opt-in’ list is probably your very best defense against being accused of spam. This method will encourage your website visitor to sign up to receive your emails. They are giving you permission to send them emails. In order to get them to sign up to your list you can offer them an incentive such as a free report or a multi part mini-course that they will receive over a period of a week or so. Whatever you offer them to get them to sign up, make sure it has real value to your subscriber. Take a little time and develop a report that has some real value and substance to it.

These are the basics of the law. I’m not an expert or a lawyer so make sure you take a little time and learn all the ins and outs of the CAN SPAM law so that you can make sure your company is in compliance. Don’t let the new laws scare you off from using mass email marketing since it can be a very effective marketing tool for your business.

If you take the time to find out what all the regulations are and then you follow them, you will be in compliance and you will be able to add a lot of customers to your business which will eventually lead to a lot more sales, and that’s what we all want.

Affiliate marketing is over a 10 year old industry now. It continues to thrive as a business model for many reasons. Let’s take a look at why affiliate marketing still works today and will continue to do so in the future.

1. The affiliate merchant gets what they want. All businesses have a simple goal and that is to sell more products.

As the Internet continues to mature virtually every industry has businesses who sell products through affiliate marketing. Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. You can buy just about everything at Amazon.

Wal-Mart.com continues to drive more business to Wal-Mart’s bottom line. Black Monday recently had over $1 billion in online sales in one day.

Digital information is selling better than ever before. As a matter of fact Amazon reports now that digital ebooks outsell hardcopy books.

Affiliate marketing is a great way for businesses to get their products out in front of the public. They are able to generate way more in business than they ever could trying to do it all by themselves.

2. The affiliate gets what they want. People go online wanting to make money every day.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best business models to get started with. It does not take any initial cash outlay to become an affiliate marketer.

You can make money from the comfort of your own home. And you can do it without starting your own website or developing your own products.

There are many examples of affiliates earning six figure incomes per year. There are even examples of affiliates earning six figure incomes per day in cost per action programs.

Whether you want to make $200 a month, or become a millionaire you can do it with affiliate marketing. The merchants provide you with everything you need including marketing materials.

The best affiliate programs understand that their affiliates are the backbone of their success. High producing affiliates are treated very well and can even make a higher commission then the regular affiliate compensation plan offers.

3. The customer gets what they want. Customers continue to use the Internet to search for products in multiple ways.

They do not particularly care where they buy the product as long as they get a good deal. This levels the playing field for affiliates to make sales.

The affiliate merchant collects the money and ships the product to the customer right away. Many times consumers do not realize they are even on an affiliate website.

These are three reasons why affiliate marketing still works today. It is a mutually beneficial business model that will continue to thrive in the future as long as it satisfies the needs of the merchant, the affiliate, and the consumer.

Every year we are seeing more Fortune 500 company marketing budgets move to performance based models, (CPL and CPA) and subsequently an increase in the number of affiliate networks. As an affiliate or advertiser, the question becomes which network should I work with? Being a part of a network, I am asked this question frequently and have come up with a response of the Top 3.5 things to look for in a Network.

1. Experience: It’s important to know the experience of the company and its history. I am not talking about a timeline of the history, but the experience the company has had in the online space and the different avenues it has used to generate leads and sales online. This is still a young industry and many of the networks have pioneered new online strategies and have helped promote our industry. This should be recognized and acknowledged when you are choosing a network. How long has the company been in business? How many years has the company been in the online space? Who is the owner and how did he get into the space?

2. Ethics: This is probably one of the most difficult things to actually measure, but if you ask around the industry there are many resources which will give you a good overview of the company’s business practices. If you are an affiliates or advertiser, ask other affiliates or advertisers about their experience with the network. One thing you will notice is that a number of the bigger companies work in “co-opetition” with each other and work together to make positive outcomes for the industry.

3. People: A company is its people. At the end of the day, it’s the affiliate manager and/or advertiser manager that have the ability and knowledge to grow the business and synonymously make money for the affiliate or advertiser. Ask the people in the company about the network they work for, this will give you a ton of insight.

3.5 Offers, Payouts, Payment Terms: I typically discuss these 3 items at the end of the conversation with a prospect. Any decent network will have exclusive offers, excellent payouts, and net terms relative to the performance and capabilities of the affiliate.
Find a network based on the first 3 criteria, and I can almost guarantee you that the network will have 3.5 covered.

We celebrated Gina Meyers 5 year and Margaret Johnsons 4 year anniversary wth TheMediaCrew.  We look forward to man y more years with them.

Another show in the books. Ad-Tech New York was another great show. It’s always nice to see familiar faces. As we all know our industry is primary phone based so when we have a chance to see our clients and potential clients face to face we jump at the chance. We sent 5 team members to this years Ad-Tech, Ross Moore, Rustam Irani, Kim White, Bill Michelon and myself (Nick Foley). This was Bills first Ad-Tech with TheMediaCrew and he did an great job! I can’t tell you how important it is to have a group of people who know how to balance the business side of Ad-Tech and the social side. Enjoying a drama free show is always a plus. This year we only hit up one party, The Mailer Meetup. It was a good event with some great information if you’re a mailer. The mailers in our industry use to NEVER talk about email stratgies but now with all the regulations and big brother (our government) watching over us it’s a must us mailers communicate with eachother in a productive manner.

Day One of the show is always the busiest in my opinion. Everyone is eager and ready to create some business.   The business-buzz is in the air.  The second day is typically the opposite. People are recovering from the night before and only talk about how wasted they got the nite before, which does give us some funny stories to talk about. Never the less I give this show an A-. The number of people who attended was good, the numbers of exhibitors were good and the topics of the speakers were good. We look forward to Ad-tech San Fransico in April. We’ll see ya there.

And congratulations to our Kim White who won a Apple iBook in the Global Wide Media drawing .. Woo-Hoo !!!

Thanks,

Nick

We’re very excited to present our 12th interview with Nick Foley of RevenueStreet.com.

Nick Foley is the Founder & CEO of TheMediaCrew an Inc.500 Florida based company. Nick founded the company 11 years ago in his one bedroom apartment on Indian Rock Beach Florida. Since then, the company has grown significantly and employees some of the best people in our industry. Nick holds a BA in Business Administration from The University of Maryland.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you?

I’m 36 years old. I grew up in the Washington DC metro area. After high school I moved to Florida to play college baseball after two years I moved back up to DC and finished school at the university of Maryland. after college I moved down to key largo in the Florida keys. after a fun experience in the keys I relocated to Indian rock beach (outside of Tampa). I started EmailMaestro.com and was a full time emailer. I self taught myself how to mail and I’m still earning new ways to mail. I also started an online casino which did very well until we had to close it down for obvious reasons. In the 5th year of EmailMaestro we changed the DBA to TheMediaCrew because our industry was evolving and our company was evolving as well so the name change was perfect timing.

2. How long have you been in affiliate marketing and how did you get involved?

I started RevenueStreet.com in 2004. We started it because we noticed the CPM and CPC models were slowly starting to die off. Additionally we retained almost 90% of our clients on the CPA/CPL model. This year we launched our propitiatory affiliate marketing tracking software EFFECTUS (www.effectus-software.com). We started to license it out and so far everything is working out great.

3. How long was it before you realized you could live off your affiliate income?

My first year. It was just me and I was a mailer (still am) I pushed out millions a days from 11 PM to 6 AM monday thru friday. my over head was almost nothing so I could live off my income the first year. That was the scariest and most exciting year for me.

4. What is the biggest mistake you made when you first started doing Affiliate Marketing?

Not fully understating the scrubbing process.

5. What was your biggest success to date?

We’ve made the Inc500 in 2009 & 2010. We made mThink.com Top 20 Affiliate Networks in the world # 19 and we made Florida Trend Magazine 2010 Best Companies to work for under 49 employees. Of all the awards I would say the Florida Trend Magazine award means the most.

6. Tell us a little bit about RevenueStreet and what you do over there?

RevenueStreet is our affiliate network. It runs on EFFECTUS our proprietary affiliate marketing tracking software. We have a great RevenueStreet team. Ross Moore is our network director. Rustam Irani (COO) and myself work with Ross to run the in’s and out;s of RevenueStreet. Ross does a fantastic job but we work well as a team. My main position is to make sure we grow in the right direction. To make sure we evolve with our industry. I’m always thinking on new ways in which revenuestreet can grow.

7. There are already so many CPA affiliate networks out there. What makes RevenueStreet different?

Our people! We have a great revenuestreet team.

8. I see you are using your own affiliate network software named Effectus. What made you build yourself, instead of choosing HasOffers, LinkTrust, DirectTrack and HitPath, etc?

CONTROL! I came up with the idea a few years ago to develop our own software. We had no control over the software we were using and the support we received was horrible. We saw so much room for improvement. We basically took all the standard features we liked plus added a ton of our own ideas and put them all into one software. The great thing about EFFECTUS is we will add features on the fly for our users. It an open source way of thinking. We want to have the best software out there and the best way to do that is by being open minded and added the features your users want and provide GREAT SUPPORT! Support is so important and it seems gets under valued.

9. Which offers are performing well on your network?

Education is our top vertical. We also do well with biz opp, travel, debt, and insurance & consumer products

10. Which traffic sources prove to be the most effective for your top earning affiliates – E-mail, PPC, PPV, Facebook, Media Buying or any others?

Email, Display, Search and Social Media is starting to pick up.

11. What are the criteria for a marketer to be accepted at RevenueStreet?

Once an application is submitted. Our client relationship manager, Susie Bordner contacts them and goes through a series of qualifying questions.

12. For those who are interested in working with you and your affiliate network – What’s the best way/time to reach you?

RevenueStreet.com

13. What are the best places for the newbie to learn affiliate marketing? What advice would you give for them?

Read the blogs out there, talk to people and ask a lot of questions. Affiliate marketing is a great business but it takes time to learn and most importantly to control.

14. In your experience, what are the three most critical elements of run a successful campaign.

Support & communication with all parties involved, proven traffic sources, and accurate tracking.

15. What’s the difference between a Super affiliate and an Average affiliate?

For us, its the volume they can produce on a consistent basis. They don’t have to drive the highest amount of traffic but drive it on a consistent basis. Our goal is to have all our affiliate become super affiliates.

16. What are the keys to building successful relationships between Affiliates and Affiliate Networks? What are some of the challenges of being an Affiliate Manager/Owner?

Communication. Establishing a solid line of communication and building that relationship will help forge long term business relationships. Being able to problem solve on a day to day basis is key. Our industry is young, fast and intelligent. When problem occur (and they do often) you need to be able to solve them quickly, fairly and make sure all parties are satisfied with the outcome.

17. If you could change one thing about the affiliate industry, what would it be?

The amount of fraud going on.

18. What do you think about where the industry is going? Where RevenueStreet may be going? What advice would you give to affiliates to keep up the pace.

I think our industry is still in its beginning stages. I see great thing for our industry but I also see a lot of companies dying off. Its survival of the fittest. The company who will survive are companies to practice good business, start a head of the curve and evolve with online marketing.

19. What are your goals in 2010?

Increase our annual revenue by 50%.

20. What’s your favorite movie and why?

Oh man, I’m a huge movie guy. I love them all .. but if I had to name one .. would be a comedy .. maybe animal house or superbad and tommy boy.

21. Give us a little glimpse into what a typical day in your life looks like.

Wake up take kids to school with my wife (sometimes) gym at 8:30, office around 10, home around 3 or 5 .. play with my kids and wife .. i enjoy just hanging with my family.

Many thanks to Nick for allowing this interview! If you have any experience with RevenueStreet Affiliate Network, please write a review for them on their review page.

Ps. If you are an affiliate marketer, AM or Network owner and are interested in answering a few questions about you, your network and affiliate marketing, please drop us a message.

I have been fortunate to contribute to one of the Tampa Bay area’s key business magazines.  Below is my second published article on email marketing and SPAM.  Hope you enjoy it.  If your company is not utilizing email marketing, you really need to consider starting yesterday.

click here to read the full article

~Rustam