Affiliate Marketing Association Conference

On November 17th the Affiliate Marketing Association will hold its 7th Affiliate Conference at the Bellsalle Event Hall in Tokyo Japan. The conference will begin at 1:45PM and ticket prices will be 1,000 YEN. The conference will feature seminars on affiliate and search engine marketing, discussions on the future of the affiliate marketing industry, communication time between merchants and affiliates and presentation of marketing research on what people think about affiliate marketing. For more info go to

http://www.sumitomo-rd.co.jp/building/kaigishitsu/bs_kanda/event/access.html

Is affiliate marketing good for B2B sites?

Last Friday I spoke at the American Chamber of Commerce Japan in Tokyo on how to mine more sales from affiliate programs. Many in attendance represented firms offering business products and solutions. I was asked by several attendees how well represented the B2B industry was in affiliate networks. The short answer is, not well represented. Unless you count office supply firms and some ASP solutions provider as B2B. The fact is, most affiliates are individual web site/blog operators and they tend to write or promote things that they understand. B2B products are a tougher sell and will likely result in fewer ad clicks to affiliates. This is not to say that affiliate marketing is a bad choice for driving sales to B2B sites. Companies selling business solutions and products will need to package their affiliate programs in a more user-friendly fashion. An affiliate program could be used to drive traffic to an online questionnaire that is structured to find possible business leads for follow up sales. But just as Alibaba.com was the answer to an online shopping mall for B2B, perhaps some savvy entrepreneur will create an affiliate network that caters to the B2B industry. A quick reminder; I will be presenting a talk on Japanese Mobile Commerce at the Digital River Global Network Sales Summit on November 7th and 8th at the Harbour Plaza Hotel in Hong Kong. Give me a shout if you’re in the neighborhood.

ValueCommerce Affiliate Expo Review

Not to be outdone by LinkShare, ValueCommerce held its own affiliate expo on October 20 at the Tokyo Conference Center in Shinagawa. Pictures and comments (in Japanese) of the event can be found here (http://vcfan.net/modules/wordpress/). The expo featured 14 seminars covering topics such as how to use blogs to promote affiliate offers by Mr. Tashiro of Nifty and a lecture from the editor in chief of Nikkei Net Marketing. The ValueCommerce development team made an appearance to help highlight some of the new features affiliates can expect in future updates of the VC dashboard interface. ValueCommerce CEO Brian Nelson held an open discussion with affiliates and received many suggestions for improvements to the VC business platform. Among the affiliate requests was suggestions for improving customer support and allowing merchants and partners to communicate more freely.

LinkShare Summit response

LinkShare Japan held an affiliate summit on October 18th at the Tokyo Dome Hotel and it seems like the reaction to the summit was mostly good.  You can read about the summit on Linkshare’s official blog (http://blog.linkshare.jp/). Detailed blog entries with photos can be found here (http://blog.linkshare.jp/2007/10/post_27b6.html#more). According to some bloggers who attended the event, the discussions and seminars were good and helped many better understand the affiliate marketing industry and the role it will play in the future with the increasing popularity of social networking service sites such as Mixi. There were a few murmurs about this not being a free event and how it was held during the week and more than half of attendants was wearing suits. Some affiliates were really happy to be able to talk directly to merchants during lunch.