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FB Live Auction Q&A reminder
A quick reminder for everyone interested in Facebook – their quarterly Q&A is happening tomorrow at 11 AM PDT.
This event is called “The ABC’s of Facebook’s Auction” but the crew takes questions from the comments regularly.
If you don’t make it, we’ll make sure to summarise the important bits for the following day, plus link you to the recording.
Another one… FB acqui-hires Vidpresso
Yes, there’s no longer a doubt about the fact that FB is very dedicated when it comes to live video.
Vidpresso is joining FB. They’re a startup that specializes in adding social features to video and live video.
What are those features? Making it easy to include all sorts of graphics that encourage viewers to respond to polls and ask questions.
The company says their vision is “to make video more like HTML — easier to author, easier to change, and customized per person”.
This just means people who livestream on FB will get access to more useful tools soon.
“But what if there are no people to watch our livestreams?”
Facebook is also trying to make sure people are connected and can watch all the content they wanna get onto the platform.
You have probably already heard about the drone idea, called Aquila. Well, that didn’t work out, at least so far.
The company has a new initiative called Connectivity that continues to pursue the goal of providing everyone on the planet with an Internet connection.
If we were trying throw a jab at Facebook we’d ask if the WiFi will ask for your FB details to connect or direct you to create a FB account.
But we’re better than that… Oh, wait!
GENERAL
State of the industry survey published
If you’ve been a reader for a bit over 2 weeks, you know that on August 3rd, Loz Green gave his view on the current state of affiliate marketing.
In short, he felt things are tricky right now, without a super clear answer to what is best to do and no easy money either.
Well, the discussion is still happening, and Lorenzo posted the results of a survey he did. 400+ people answered so that’s a decent sample.
The results?
E-Commerce is the biggest vertical right now, with 48% of affiliates votes. It’s followed by lead gen and health & beauty.
The classic sweeps and mobile offers are 4th and 5th but far behind.
What we found interesting is that both affiliate managers and affiliate network owners don’t even have e-commerce on the list.
Here’s why we think this is the case – e-commerce doesn’t require an affiliate network. Most affiliates that moved into this vertical just start their own stores and use their advertising skills.
We’re sure many of you reading this did exactly that. But, if you’re an affiliate network, there might be an opportunity to bring some e-commerce offers to the spotlight.
When it comes to overall feeling about the industry, affiliates reported average or below average financial returns. And as you might know, most affiliates tend to adjust up, so we’re betting the reality is at least a little bit worse than an anonymous survey.
The key takeaways from Loz Green?
- “Lead Generation, Ecommerce and Health & Beauty offers now dominate the space. 2/3 of those aren’t exactly “affiliate” offers. The industry is changing. More than ever before “affiliates” are creating businesses instead of purely arbitrage operations.
- Advertisers seem like they have the best seat in the house. With that being said it is very likely that a lot of advertisers are ex-successful affiliates who have evolved their businesses to the next level.
- Affiliate networks have taken a hit due to the above. It doesn’t look like things are going to get any easier…unless there is some serious innovation and/or a true USP. It’s pretty obvious which networks are leading the way and which ones are becoming very quiet.”
The discussion on the topic is still continuing on the post, so definitely check it out!
Twitter has not given up the fight for growth
We like to keep an eye on Twitter. We think it’s underused by affiliates. Whether paid or organic reach, some products make sense for it.
And there’s a little bit of good news from the blue birdie.
Their Lite app is expanding to 21 more countries, in hopes this grows its user base.
Twitter Lite is basically what it sounds like – an app that requires fewer resources, so it can properly work on low-end phones you find in most developing countries, and on slower, limited connections.
Useful tools round-up
We’ve collected another bunch of interesting tools you might wanna use in your business. Maybe at some point we’ve recommended everything that makes sense but until then…
Get people back to your tab
Don’t Close This Tab tells you in the name what it does… Kinda. It doesn’t stop visitors from closing the tab but when they switch to another tab, it changes the title of the original one to something like “Hey, come back!”
The main use cases they recommend are for abandoned carts, pricing and sign up pages, and for bloggers to encourage visitors to continue reading an article or commenting.
Referral programs
Or encouraging your existing customers and users to share with their friends.
We found 2 tools that seem to be pretty good at that, both used by decently sized companies already. But both have reasonably affordable starting plans.
They are also quite similar in what their purpose is. To keep it simple, it’s to quickly create a referral program for your product.
They are Friendbuy and Viral Loops. We suggest having a look at both if you’re interested in creating referral programs.
From what we could tell, the first important difference is that Viral Loops has cheaper starting plans, while Friendbuy seems to be more for advanced users.
The best image compression tool we’ve ever seen
Ever since we got into affiliate marketing, one big discussion point was optimizing loading speed of landing pages, and that meant a lot of image compressing.
We’ve been through all the tools but this one is a clear winner for us.
We’ve started using it since launching this newsletter and the results are always great. It offers so much control between quality and compression, more than we’ve ever seen.
It’s called Compress Or Die, it can do pretty much anything: compress, resize, change file type. Has even more things to adjust for GIFs.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The “unhackable” does it again!
It’s been hacked again. We’re talking about McAfee’s favourite crypto wallet, Bitfi.
After the very first warning sign, when researchers were able to get root access, they took it a step further and played DOOM on it.
Both these times, there was a loud crowd, including McAfee, that said: “this is not a hack”.
Well, there’s not much more to say now because researchers were able to successfully send signed transactions with the device.
This is Bounty 2 from Bitfi and it should be rewarded with $10,000. Let’s see if this actually happens, or maybe the goal posts will be moved.
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