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Will You Add? - Interview with Lily Shen - Senior Manager of eBay's U.S. Affiliate Program
My first year as a Cyberpreneur was a steep learning-curve. I was an academic before starting an online business, so I had a lot to learn. But even if you were in offline-business before going online, you may still have to learn some new skills -online business is a whole new ball-game. Here are some of the things I learnt in my first year in Cyber Space:(1) Be careful who you register your domain with. Some domain name registrars make it very difficult to change your web host.I registered my first two domains with a registrar that caused me more headaches than I care to think about.When I needed to transfer one of my domain names to a new web host, my original email address had changed. I was no longer able to send them an email from that address and so I couldn't authenticate my request for domain transfer.So I tried to update my personal record with my new email address. I got a message saying that I could only change my email address by sending an email from my original email address (which no longer existed).This bureaucratic nightmare went on for 4 weeks. To add to my frustration, I was communicating with a machine, not a human being. By the end of that time I had no less than 35 computer-generated emails telling me that my domain coul
We found what makes most affiliates successful is less about the model they engage, as a matter of fact many of them employ multiple models, but what really determines there success is there level of dedication to innovating: finding new things and really optimizing what works. The space is constantly changing as well as the marketplace, so we find that those who are really dedicated to it find huge success in it.
Shawn: Great. For affiliates from the newbies up to the experienced ones, do you have any particular tips and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?
Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think about the end customer and stay abreast of not only industry trends but also product trends. Obviously for this holiday season it would be the PS3, Wii, the Xbox, etc. Some new top affiliates just this past month have solely built sites around these products and have simply turned the traffic to eBay. That's pretty interesting. We really encourage our affiliates to keep on top of that. I would say it's really tough to try new things and to really optimize space on the results that you see in the data that we provide you. A lot of our affiliates have been successful that way.
Shawn: OK. I know you h
Flyers are a good standby tool for marketing both online and off. And there’s no need to be a genius to create a great one, either. Here are some basic guidelines to design your own flyers.1. MICROSOFT WORD – Begin with a basic software program like Microsoft Word or Publisher. Open up the program, then look under “File” then “New” to see if there are already existing flyer wizards for documents or templates. If so, start there and adjust one to suit your needs.2. COLOR – First take a look at your project budget. Is there room for full-color printing of hard copies to distribute? If not, don’t worry. Regular black ink on colored paper produces nice looking, professional flyers. Coordinate the paper color with a theme for the month, like green paper for St. Patrick’s Day or red or blue for the 4th of July.3. TEXT / FONT – Don’t have too many different fonts, text sizes and styles in one document. Just choose a couple of complimentary fonts and sizes. For ideas on which to use, start a collection of flyers that are stuck on your door, around your mailbox and placed on your car’s windshield. Search your favorite industry web sites for ideas, too, by looking at their online documents for downloading. Print them out and check to see what you link and don’t lik
Lily Shen: Thanks, Shawn. I'm definitely excited to speak with you and definitely look forward to sharing some more information. We have a lot of exciting things going on, so, yeah, definitely looking forward to it.
Shawn: Great. One thing that I am curious about it, if you could let me know and the rest of the audience, what sets eBay's Affiliate Program apart from the other affiliate programs that are out there?
Lily: Sure. I can't really speak for other affiliate programs per se, but I do have to say that the eBay Affiliate Program offers a really competitive payout, very easy to use tools, and the unparalleled breadth and depth of products that are currently on eBay.
In terms of our compensation today, we pay out on both ACRUs, what we call Active Nearly Registered Users, and we pay anywhere from $12 to $22. We also pay on the rev share side anywhere from 40 to 65 percent of revenues generated to eBay buyer affiliates, and that launched just late last year and it's proven to be very successful for many of our publishers.
In terms of the marketplaces, we have an amazing breadth and depth of products with over 50, 000 categories, and even just in Q3 we had 584 million new listings added to eBay worldwide. We also have a global presence in over 33 markets with users from every country around the world, so we definitely provide a great playground for our affiliates and our publishers to be successful.
Shawn: Great, sounds fantastic. Can you tell me a little more about some of the tools and resources that eBay has innovated to help affiliates to succeed?
Lily: Yeah, absolutely. We actually have a dedicated team here just looking at products, tools, and infrastructure for the eBay Affiliate Program. We have a number of tools that our affiliates employ to really get them up and running quickly.
To start, we have a flexible destination tool which instantly allows affiliates to create trackable affiliate links to any eBay URL. We just this year launched an RSS feed generator that obviously creates RSS feeds that include affiliate links. We offer free APIs for our affiliates, and just a couple of months ago we launched an API plug-in tool that allows affiliates to conduct some research and become more familiar with eBay's API data in Excel.
We also have hub pages, very vibrant discussion boards, and community newsletters et cetera. I don't know if you are aware of this, but we are actually looking to launch in probably the first half of 2007 a product called AdContext, which is a contextual advertising product that will allow affiliates and our publishers to basically take some code and put the product on the site, and we'll essentially call the content from the site and surface up the most listings that will help our affiliates be most effective. We're currently in beta mode at the moment.
Shawn: So is that available to all affiliates or just a select group of affiliates?
Lily: This is currently invite-only.
Shawn: OK. Gotcha. As far as engaging the eBay affiliate community, are you using any kind of Web 2.0 methods for communication or have any events or any kinds of things to get in touch with the affiliates and keep in contact?
Lily: Yeah, absolutely. We have a dedicated team of account managers both here at eBay and on the Commission Junction side, and we manage many, many of our top accounts. We actually do have a monthly newsletter that goes out that provides best practices, trends, product information to our publishers. As I mentioned before, we have very active discussion boards, and we also hold an annual invite-only affiliate summit for our top publishers, and we run this in parallel with our developer's conference. This year we are looking to build that out even more and have an affiliate track at the developer's conference, too.
In addition to that, we have very comprehensive pages on the affiliate site that provides best practices for our affiliates who are really looking to pursue almost any type of business model. We are always looking for new ways to share information and allow affiliates to really communicate with each other as well.
The community is really the bread and butter of eBay's business, and that is absolutely the same thing for eBay's affiliate community. We feel that it is really important that we develop the relationships with them directly and learn from them.
Shawn: Great. As far as the different types of affiliates, there are so many types of affiliates out there, is there a particular kind of affiliate that is usually more successful with your affiliate program?
Lily: I wouldn't say it depends on a business model, per se. We have a very diverse portfolio of affiliates ranging from content and portals and SEO, shopping comparison sites. We have auction tools, loyalty incentive affiliates and obviously paid search affiliates.
We found what makes most affiliates successful is less about the model they engage, as a matter of fact many of them employ multiple models, but what really determines there success is there level of dedication to innovating: finding new things and really optimizing what works. The space is constantly changing as well as the marketplace, so we find that those who are really dedicated to it find huge success in it.
Shawn: Great. For affiliates from the newbies up to the experienced ones, do you have any particular tips and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?
Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think about the end customer and stay abreast of not only industry trends but also product trends. Obviously for this holiday season it would be the PS3, Wii, the Xbox, etc. Some new top affiliates just this past month have solely built sites around these products and have simply turned the traffic to eBay. That's pretty interesting. We really encourage our affiliates to keep on top of that. I would say it's really tough to try new things and to really optimize space on the results that you see in the data that we provide you. A lot of our affiliates have been successful that way.
Shawn: OK. I know you ha
When asked his secret to success, the author Graham Green said that it was down to his always writing 500 words a day. There are real reasons why this philosophy rings true:a) The single best creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific – quality of output is closely related to quantity.b) In the early stages, relative lack of experience, knowledge and refined methodology limits performance to sub-optimal levels. With time these factors improve and productivity increases exponentially. The experience curve implies that creativity should get easier and faster the more it is engaged in.c) The major part of learning takes place subliminally and unconsciously. When we are strongly motivated by an endeavour, we will become good at it by working on it at various cognitive levels.d) Many skilled actions are initially learnt with much conscious effort then, with practice, they come easily and smoothly (subliminal perception and learning). After complete automisation, paying complete attention can actually be detrimental.e) Incremental targets produce more output than a “do your best” approach. If a leader asks participants in an idea generating session to address a problem and think of at least
In terms of the marketplaces, we have an amazing breadth and depth of products with over 50, 000 categories, and even just in Q3 we had 584 million new listings added to eBay worldwide. We also have a global presence in over 33 markets with users from every country around the world, so we definitely provide a great playground for our affiliates and our publishers to be successful.
Shawn: Great, sounds fantastic. Can you tell me a little more about some of the tools and resources that eBay has innovated to help affiliates to succeed?
Lily: Yeah, absolutely. We actually have a dedicated team here just looking at products, tools, and infrastructure for the eBay Affiliate Program. We have a number of tools that our affiliates employ to really get them up and running quickly.
To start, we have a flexible destination tool which instantly allows affiliates to create trackable affiliate links to any eBay URL. We just this year launched an RSS feed generator that obviously creates RSS feeds that include affiliate links. We offer free APIs for our affiliates, and just a couple of months ago we launched an API plug-in tool that allows affiliates to conduct some research and become more familiar with eBay's API data in Excel.
We also have hub pages, very vibrant discussion boards, and community newsletters et cetera. I don't know if you are aware of this, but we are actually looking to launch in probably the first half of 2007 a product called AdContext, which is a contextual advertising product that will allow affiliates and our publishers to basically take some code and put the product on the site, and we'll essentially call the content from the site and surface up the most listings that will help our affiliates be most effective. We're currently in beta mode at the moment.
Shawn: So is that available to all affiliates or just a select group of affiliates?
Lily: This is currently invite-only.
Shawn: OK. Gotcha. As far as engaging the eBay affiliate community, are you using any kind of Web 2.0 methods for communication or have any events or any kinds of things to get in touch with the affiliates and keep in contact?
Lily: Yeah, absolutely. We have a dedicated team of account managers both here at eBay and on the Commission Junction side, and we manage many, many of our top accounts. We actually do have a monthly newsletter that goes out that provides best practices, trends, product information to our publishers. As I mentioned before, we have very active discussion boards, and we also hold an annual invite-only affiliate summit for our top publishers, and we run this in parallel with our developer's conference. This year we are looking to build that out even more and have an affiliate track at the developer's conference, too.
In addition to that, we have very comprehensive pages on the affiliate site that provides best practices for our affiliates who are really looking to pursue almost any type of business model. We are always looking for new ways to share information and allow affiliates to really communicate with each other as well.
The community is really the bread and butter of eBay's business, and that is absolutely the same thing for eBay's affiliate community. We feel that it is really important that we develop the relationships with them directly and learn from them.
Shawn: Great. As far as the different types of affiliates, there are so many types of affiliates out there, is there a particular kind of affiliate that is usually more successful with your affiliate program?
Lily: I wouldn't say it depends on a business model, per se. We have a very diverse portfolio of affiliates ranging from content and portals and SEO, shopping comparison sites. We have auction tools, loyalty incentive affiliates and obviously paid search affiliates.
We found what makes most affiliates successful is less about the model they engage, as a matter of fact many of them employ multiple models, but what really determines there success is there level of dedication to innovating: finding new things and really optimizing what works. The space is constantly changing as well as the marketplace, so we find that those who are really dedicated to it find huge success in it.
Shawn: Great. For affiliates from the newbies up to the experienced ones, do you have any particular tips and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?
Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think about the end customer and stay abreast of not only industry trends but also product trends. Obviously for this holiday season it would be the PS3, Wii, the Xbox, etc. Some new top affiliates just this past month have solely built sites around these products and have simply turned the traffic to eBay. That's pretty interesting. We really encourage our affiliates to keep on top of that. I would say it's really tough to try new things and to really optimize space on the results that you see in the data that we provide you. A lot of our affiliates have been successful that way.
Shawn: OK. I know you h
There are many different and varied ways of earning money whilst online, and if all used suitably and correctly you could easily make a living just working at home using the Internet. With some of the online jobs, perseverance will be the key: don’t just give up after a few days of answering paid surveys when you get frustrated seeing your account balance still sitting empty. Simply put, these methods of earning money online are guaranteed to work, but you must be a patient person. Don’t expect instant results, and don’t simply expect to sit back and watch the money roll in; nothing in life is this simple, you have to put a lot of work into things before you start to see any positive developments.One of the first things you should do is to join a free paid survey website. There are several well known paid survey sites that are completely free to join and use, and upon entering some simple questions on their website you should start getting emailed surveys, usually around 3 or 4 times a week. Complete these surveys and eventually your account balance will get updated (this isn’t instant, so don’t panic when you appear to have earned no money as usually it takes a week or so to be included in your earnings). A paid survey completed will earn you around ?4 from about 30 m
We also have hub pages, very vibrant discussion boards, and community newsletters et cetera. I don't know if you are aware of this, but we are actually looking to launch in probably the first half of 2007 a product called AdContext, which is a contextual advertising product that will allow affiliates and our publishers to basically take some code and put the product on the site, and we'll essentially call the content from the site and surface up the most listings that will help our affiliates be most effective. We're currently in beta mode at the moment.
Shawn: So is that available to all affiliates or just a select group of affiliates?
Lily: This is currently invite-only.
Shawn: OK. Gotcha. As far as engaging the eBay affiliate community, are you using any kind of Web 2.0 methods for communication or have any events or any kinds of things to get in touch with the affiliates and keep in contact?
Lily: Yeah, absolutely. We have a dedicated team of account managers both here at eBay and on the Commission Junction side, and we manage many, many of our top accounts. We actually do have a monthly newsletter that goes out that provides best practices, trends, product information to our publishers. As I mentioned before, we have very active discussion boards, and we also hold an annual invite-only affiliate summit for our top publishers, and we run this in parallel with our developer's conference. This year we are looking to build that out even more and have an affiliate track at the developer's conference, too.
In addition to that, we have very comprehensive pages on the affiliate site that provides best practices for our affiliates who are really looking to pursue almost any type of business model. We are always looking for new ways to share information and allow affiliates to really communicate with each other as well.
The community is really the bread and butter of eBay's business, and that is absolutely the same thing for eBay's affiliate community. We feel that it is really important that we develop the relationships with them directly and learn from them.
Shawn: Great. As far as the different types of affiliates, there are so many types of affiliates out there, is there a particular kind of affiliate that is usually more successful with your affiliate program?
Lily: I wouldn't say it depends on a business model, per se. We have a very diverse portfolio of affiliates ranging from content and portals and SEO, shopping comparison sites. We have auction tools, loyalty incentive affiliates and obviously paid search affiliates.
We found what makes most affiliates successful is less about the model they engage, as a matter of fact many of them employ multiple models, but what really determines there success is there level of dedication to innovating: finding new things and really optimizing what works. The space is constantly changing as well as the marketplace, so we find that those who are really dedicated to it find huge success in it.
Shawn: Great. For affiliates from the newbies up to the experienced ones, do you have any particular tips and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?
Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think about the end customer and stay abreast of not only industry trends but also product trends. Obviously for this holiday season it would be the PS3, Wii, the Xbox, etc. Some new top affiliates just this past month have solely built sites around these products and have simply turned the traffic to eBay. That's pretty interesting. We really encourage our affiliates to keep on top of that. I would say it's really tough to try new things and to really optimize space on the results that you see in the data that we provide you. A lot of our affiliates have been successful that way.
Shawn: OK. I know you h
As a legal need, the submission of an annual report to shareholders, investors and trustees is something that can re-inforce the organisations core branding and values. A poorly designed document is going to reflect badly on the organisation and in some cases may mean investor withdrawal if they are particularly upset. So here then are the right ways to go about things.Choosing the right annual report designersMany charities and some corporate firms are tied to strictly budgeted guidelines and often use amateur designers or recommended friends to produce these complex reports. Would you let a helpful friend come in and have a go at cutting your hair off without any credentials to back up their skills? Of course not, unless you were really tight. It obviously makes sense then to choose an annual report design company that have a proven track history in this field and can show off some impressive design portfolio of past annual reports they have designed to back up their quality.Don't make a mess of the figuresMore often than not an annual report graphic designer will be handed over a bunch of excel documents including balance sheet reports and financial statement reports and be expected to turn a page of numbers into something approaching creative d
In addition to that, we have very comprehensive pages on the affiliate site that provides best practices for our affiliates who are really looking to pursue almost any type of business model. We are always looking for new ways to share information and allow affiliates to really communicate with each other as well.
The community is really the bread and butter of eBay's business, and that is absolutely the same thing for eBay's affiliate community. We feel that it is really important that we develop the relationships with them directly and learn from them.
Shawn: Great. As far as the different types of affiliates, there are so many types of affiliates out there, is there a particular kind of affiliate that is usually more successful with your affiliate program?
Lily: I wouldn't say it depends on a business model, per se. We have a very diverse portfolio of affiliates ranging from content and portals and SEO, shopping comparison sites. We have auction tools, loyalty incentive affiliates and obviously paid search affiliates.
We found what makes most affiliates successful is less about the model they engage, as a matter of fact many of them employ multiple models, but what really determines there success is there level of dedication to innovating: finding new things and really optimizing what works. The space is constantly changing as well as the marketplace, so we find that those who are really dedicated to it find huge success in it.
Shawn: Great. For affiliates from the newbies up to the experienced ones, do you have any particular tips and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?
Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think about the end customer and stay abreast of not only industry trends but also product trends. Obviously for this holiday season it would be the PS3, Wii, the Xbox, etc. Some new top affiliates just this past month have solely built sites around these products and have simply turned the traffic to eBay. That's pretty interesting. We really encourage our affiliates to keep on top of that. I would say it's really tough to try new things and to really optimize space on the results that you see in the data that we provide you. A lot of our affiliates have been successful that way.
Shawn: OK. I know you h
Despite spending hours in the 'phone or online your customers are just not connecting with you, resulting in angry customers hanging up and going elsewhere.We are becoming more and more divided by technology. Your customers' dread interactive voice-response, the on-hold music that doubles the annoyance of queuing, the codes and passwords, are all barriers to effective communication.The rage among your customers has reached an intensity, which is now causing great damage to your relationship with your customers. We are now dehumanising our customer relationships even more than conventional advertising ever did, the very objective of which was to do the exact opposite!Your customers appear to be invisible to you except as computer generated stereotypes, while your organisation is viewed as remote and unreachable causing stress and suspicion rather than customer satisfaction.According to a recent study by database software specialist Data Vantage. Fully eighty nine percent of service providers are failing to deliver the seamless service your customers want.Causing damage to your brands, customers to defect, thus putting more pressure on sales.It would appear that most customer information in to days service organisations, expensively
We found what makes most affiliates successful is less about the model they engage, as a matter of fact many of them employ multiple models, but what really determines there success is there level of dedication to innovating: finding new things and really optimizing what works. The space is constantly changing as well as the marketplace, so we find that those who are really dedicated to it find huge success in it.
Shawn: Great. For affiliates from the newbies up to the experienced ones, do you have any particular tips and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?
Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think about the end customer and stay abreast of not only industry trends but also product trends. Obviously for this holiday season it would be the PS3, Wii, the Xbox, etc. Some new top affiliates just this past month have solely built sites around these products and have simply turned the traffic to eBay. That's pretty interesting. We really encourage our affiliates to keep on top of that. I would say it's really tough to try new things and to really optimize space on the results that you see in the data that we provide you. A lot of our affiliates have been successful that way.
Shawn: OK. I know you have affiliate teams all around the world. Do you have any tips for affiliates that want to expand beyond the US borders as an affiliate?
Lily: Yes. We have programs in almost 20 countries today. We manage them in a very decentralized manner, and so we recognize the importance of localization in our affiliate program. I really encourage the affiliates to research the market itself and understand the end users there, but also spend some time understanding the programs of each of our countries.
You may find that the more mature markets may be more similar in nature. For example, you may want to start with English speaking countries if you're currently in the US. You may want to start with the UK, Australia or Canada and you've got a springboard to launch into some of the other markets. I would definitely say spend time localizing your content enough for it to appeal to the end consumer in the English market. I would say that geo-targeting has helped our affiliates a lot as well.
Shawn: OK. I've been hearing a lot about affiliates trying to play around with both video and mobile phone. Do you see either one of those playing a role with the eBay affiliate program in the near future?
Lily: Yes, absolutely. In terms of mobile it already plays a role in the program and we're looking to make that even bigger. We're actually launching a place off our API probably in the first half of next year that will really enable affiliate tracking for a lot of the folks that are building mobile apps for eBay. What we really want to do is allow affiliates to scale in this space. Certainly in terms of video, we believe it's a huge opportunity and we're just starting to work with a few affiliates now looking to plan this new and exciting space as well. We'll definitely have more information to come.
Shawn: OK, fantastic. I got some announcements in the past month that Project Rover and how the affiliate program has changed with that?
Lily: Sure. Project Rover is really a new HTML tracking methodology. We pursued this in order to decrease the number of redirects users may follow to reduce added cookie blocking and to allow for more global infrastructure improvements. The affiliate program itself hasn't really changed. We're simply looking for new ways to improve the infrastructure for our affiliates and to make things easier. Our goal is to simply provide more immediate and long-term benefits to our publishers with the project. I'd say that the program itself hasn't changed. We're just hoping to make things better for them.
Shawn: OK, that makes sense. That's all the questions I had. Do have any other updates or news about the affiliate program?
Lily: I think I covered a lot with the questions that you had. I just want to say that we really encourage our affiliates to innovate and to test and to provide us with feedback on things that we could be doing better as well. We're really here to serve our publishers and we're excited for a lot of the new and upcoming initiatives rolling out in 2007, such as ad contacts in the place off our API. Thank you.
Shawn: Thanks a lot. Thank you to Lily Shen eBay for joining us. For more information affiliates can go to affiliates.ebay.com to apply and learn more about the program. Thanks a lot, Lily.
Lily: Thank you.
Shawn: Great. Take care.
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