ValueCommerce Expo – Oct. 20th, 2007

Word just came in that ValueCommerce (the granddaddy of affiliate marketing in Japan) will hold an Expo on October 20th at the Tokyo Conference Center in Shinagawa. Over 40 merchants plan to set up booths at the Expo to meet and recruit affiliates for their programs. The Expo will also feature seminars and presentations by the VC staff, Yahoo Japan (a major shareholder of ValueCommerce) and famous SEO specialist and site owners. Unlike the Affiliate Summits in the USA and Europe (where merchants across various networks are represented), the VC Expo will be focusing on merchants running programs on the VC network. Not sure if CEO Brian Nelson is scheduled to talk at the Expo, but if he is, and you’re in Tokyo during the Expo, I encourage you to check it out. Brian’s speeches are always a treat.

LinkShare Japan blogging from The Big Apple

LinkShare Japan announced the launch of an affiliate news blog written by Japanese LinkShare employees based in The Big Apple. At first glance, the blog seems to cover many of the standard industry news items, including ecommerce services and applications rollouts, SEO and of course, affiliate marketing in the States. Here I am, a New Yorker living in Japan writing about the Japanese affiliate marketing business, and somewhere in New York is a Japanese writing about The American affiliate marketing industry…did I just blow your mind?

Mobile Affiliate and RSS Marketing link up for new mobile blog service

Mobile Affiliate and RSS Marketing have launched a new mobile based blog service. (click for Japanese article). The service is called “PockeBlo” (http://p269.mobi only available from mobile phone) and was launched on Aug 3, 2007.

RSS Marketing will be in charge of system development and management while Mobile Affiliate will take charge of advertisement sales and liaison with the affiliate networks. There are already 1600 registered users. PockeBlo will allow registered users to create and email updates to their mobile blog. Photos can also be emailed to blog entries. Users can choose from a variety of blog templates and backgrounds and can communicate with other blog writers within the system. Since Mobile Affiliate is an affiliate network provider, I am guessing that the blog service will be integrated with their affiliate tracking system to allow bloggers to earn revenue from their blog. It’s still not clear if affiliate ads will be limited to those offered on the Mobile Affiliate Network or if bloggers will be allowed to place ads from competing networks.

Japanese buying more through blogs

According to the Nikkei Search Data Signal, 76.2% of Japanese Internet users are aware of blogs and the recent upsurge in their popularity. The survey also reported that 32.4% of men and 47.1% of women buy products that were introduced in a blog article. As for what types of products are being bought; 35.1% are books, 26.9% food and 23.1% is electronics.  Based on my understanding, it seems like the data is related to products that are written up in blogs instead of regular blog ads.

The original Japanese article can be found at the following link:

http://www.linkshare.ne.jp/2007/07/471.html