Affiliates that drive a lot of traffic always expect better rates.  However, quality traffic trumps quantity every time.  It is essential to understand the demographics of your current traffic and how to attract more of the users that actually value the offer.  Advertisers search for traffic that generates high quality leads.

It sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.  The most difficult hurdle I have, as an affiliate manager, is the old school way of thinking, the belief that the higher the lead quantity, the higher the rates.  In reality, it is higher lead quality that garners better rates.

Some of the factors that influence quality are:

1. Know your audience – Niche audiences can perform much better in generating quality leads than mass audiences.  Understanding what drives a niche audience makes it easier to find affiliate offers that match their interests.  If you have mass traffic, try to determine if you can segment the traffic to gain a better understanding of specific target audiences.
2.  Original Content with Specific Key Words - To attract a “niche” audience, it is imperative you have quality content that can be found by search spiders.  Identify what your target audience is looking for and include it on your web site. 
3. Update Content Regularly – Letting a web site with great content go dormant will not grow your business.  Share your passion and update your content continuously to keep the search spiders working to your advantage.

The trick to success is to attract a specific audience with enough scale to be meaningful.  As AOL mentioned in their earnings call, “We have a content plan which is based on hitting very important audiences with content that matters to them,” comments Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL.  You may never get to the scale of AOL, but build your site on solid marketing principles and you will be on your way to maximizing revenue with affiliate lead quality.

 If fun, downloadable consumer apps interest your audience, be sure to check out the W3i Affiliate Program.  Top performing offers include downloads for music, video, games, social, and desktop entertainment.

 Joan Joans, Account Executive, W3i, LLC
Joan is the guardian of Affiliate relationships at W3i, providing resources and solutions to strategic accounts. 

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The Challenge
Going live with an advertiser’s offer is only the beginning when distributing through the W3i Application Network.  As with landing pages, the challenge is to optimize the critical elements so that ROI is optimized.      

The Solution
W3i provides consultative and testing services for advertisers to increase acceptance rates.  One of the first things we look at is the disclosure screen itself.  The disclosure screen is the screen shown to the user within the installation manager, InstallIQ, that discloses the required information about the application.  Ultimately the goal is to improve acceptance rates.  It works like this, W3i mocks up multiple disclosure screens based on the findings of previous tests.  W3i runs tests on the disclosure screen mocks showing the various screens to users to determine which one has the highest acceptance rate.  W3i replaces the original disclosure screen with the one that performs the best. 

The Results
An example of a disclosure screen test that W3i recently ran was for a security application.  There was a 6.45% gain in acceptance rate with one of the versions tested. Needless to say, that version was rolled out.

Here are some things that W3i found to perform better in terms of improved acceptance rates with disclosure screens, but ultimately testing can only determine what works best for each particular application:

• Illustrating what the software does instead of having multiple useless graphics
• Having the copy left aligned
• Showing the functionality of the applications simply
• Trying to limit the amount of information on the screen to avoid crowding

Following is an example of these tips at work on an internal W3i product disclosure screen:

The top image is a control disclosure screen for one of W3i’s internal products.  The bottom image is a test version that had a 2.48% improved acceptance rate.

Find Out More
To learn more about optimizing within the W3i Application Network, contact Nicole Przybilla at nicole.przybilla@w3i.com or call 320-257-7500 ext. 1020.

Nicole Przybilla, Account Executive, W3i, LLC
Nicole focuses on growing W3i business relationships, making sure the client has what they need to help them be successful. If they aren’t happy, she isn’t happy. 

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Over the past few years, our Business Intelligence group developed solutions under the SCRUM Agile development methodology.  The SCRUM methodology provides a superb framework for the development process, however, we started to encounter shortfalls with regard to widespread understanding of what information was available for consumption and, more importantly, how to leverage that information to derive business value.

After stepping back and taking a look at how we as a Business Intelligence Team architected, developed, and released our solutions, we were hard pressed to locate a flaw in the process – Development commitments were being met every sprint, team members were engaged and enjoyed their work, the information made available by our solutions was accurate and timely.  Why weren’t more people using this new information?  Why hadn’t we taken over the world yet with this new found insight?

“Because we never fully explained how to use it.”

Well, that’s not entirely true as ad-hoc training sessions occurred quite frequently; and we even held multiple, large-scale sessions throughout the years, but the argument was made that our priorities focused largely on solution development and minimally on education.  In hindsight, it is quite ridiculous to assume that the existence of new information is intrinsically valuable – information is only as valuable as we make it.

This realization threw a little bit of a wrench in our well-oiled SCRUM sprints as there was now this new need, “show and tell” if you will.  SCRUM has a mechanism for this in the form of a Business Review where developers demonstrate what was created, walk through new features and interfaces check off functional requirements and illustrate how the solution meets all specified acceptance criteria.  Traditionally, this business review happens between sprint iterations directly after the previous iteration’s stories are released.  While we faithfully conducted Business Reviews to introduce our solutions to business users – that is all we did, introduce them.

We have since committed to setting aside a certain percentage of every Business Intelligence Developer’s resources each sprint to spend time working with these solutions and presenting compelling demonstrations of how to leverage these solutions to derive business value, support initiatives, and, of course, conquer the world.

Never get too wrapped up in all your business intelligence – you may lose sight of the business.

Tim Laqua, Business Intelligence Team Lead, W3i, LLC
Tim uses his three years experience in Business Intelligence and 10+ years in the field of Software Development to lead his team here at W3i.

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IPTV is at the forefront for many top consumer tech companies. At the CES show in January, Samsung announced the launch of Samsung Apps, a multi-device application store which would make apps available for a range of devices, including HDTV’s. As part of their announcement, Samsung named several content partners which were already on-board, including Blockbuster, USA Today and others. Yahoo is also one of the big players in the web TV app space with their TV widgets (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/services/tv-widgets).  Yahoo has apps like YouTube, Amazon Video on Demand, Blockbuster, Twitter and TV Guide.

So, just what will be the killer apps for IPTV? I will explore some obvious, and not so obvious, killer apps for IPTV.

The IPTV Apps Already Being Consumed By Early Adopters

Content Discovery Apps for Long Tail Video & Professionally Produced Movies/TV: YouTube and start-up Clicker will compete with each other to be the TV guide of the future.  For movies, Netflix and Blockbuster are already providing on demand solutions for their customers. To be the killer app, these video services need to understand who is in the living room. If I am looking for content for just myself, I am likely to tune into business news or a historical documentary, if my wife, daughter and I are all sitting in the room, we are likely to watch American Idol as we all have at least some level of interest in it.

Content Discovery Apps for Music: Many televisions are already coming pre-loaded with Pandora. Whether you have friends over, or are simply looking for background music while you are doing something else, services like Pandora and Slacker provide a nice alternative to the radio or a personal music collection.

News/Weather: USA Today and AccuWeather.com were named as content partners for the Samsung App. The key question in my mind is, “what content will these companies showcase in the form of an app that will be more useful than simply tuning into a news or weather cable station?”

On-Screen Caller ID: Definitely not the killer app, but having caller id on your television is a nice utility to have.

Photo Viewing: Flicker and Picasa are already available for IPTV purposes. Browsing through photos on a giant high def television with your friends and family makes a lot more sense than crowding around a small desktop monitor.

The Future IPTV Apps That May be the True Killer Apps

Apps that Interact with Shows Themselves: These will likely take many forms.  Let’s consider several examples:

• You are watching Vikings versus Packers and the widget shows you the box score on the side or does polls like “should they go for it.”
• You could use Twitter or Facebook to see the crowd’s comments or your friend’s comments that are relevant to the program you are watching.
• You are watching a movie and a movie widget allows you to see information about the movie such as actors, directors, year released, reviews, etc.
• You are watching a show like American Idol and are able to cast your vote through your TV instead of calling in.

Social Media- Twitter was announced as a part of the Samsung CES press release. I would expect top existing social media players like Twitter and Facebook to emerge with top apps for IPTV. Wouldn’t it be cool to see your Twitter stream on a giant HDTV television or flip through your friend’s Facebook photos easily on your big screen?

Games- Today, consumers who want to play games on their televisions rely on consoles. Will they tomorrow? One scrappy start-up named OnLive is betting that you’ll play games directly through an internet connection. 

Family Calendars- Right now, it is common to still find a family calendar hanging on a refrigerator with various important dates scribbled on it. Why not turn tomorrow’s living room into a central calendar for the family, and sync up everyone’s calendars together using IPTV? The utility of a Windows app like Cozi would make for a nice background on an HDTV.

Video Call- How cool would it be to be to chat with loved ones on a giant screen, as if they are sitting in your living room? I expect existing video call players like Skype, ooVoo, and Logitech to compete to provide you with this type of functionality. Take video calling one step further, and imagine the use of 3D television capabilities to do video calling.

Now that we have the IPTV killer apps out of the way, how are you likely to gain access to them? This will be an important question for app marketers, as it will change the way they think about distribution. There is a heavyweight fight going between where the widgets/downloads will be placed:

• On your TV
• On a box like Roku or Boxee.tv
• On your video game machine like Xbox 360 or PS3
• On other devices like a Blue Ray player
• On a laptop with wired or wireless connection to your TV

If you disagree with my ideas for killer apps for IPTV, have a fantasy IPTV app of your own, or care to provide any other commentary on IPTV app trends, please share your perspective by adding a comment to this blog.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

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Marketers are challenged with how to grab people’s attention and how to keep it.   Software marketers are no exception.  Of course, given the nature of software applications, software distribution campaigns can become more creative than your typical “durable” product. 

With the recency of the Super Bowl, I remember the one-time-only showing of the Orwellian Macintosh ad, which generated considerable interest in Apple’s Macintosh; but there are more light-hearted examples than 1984.

• Thanks to LimeWire for some search power and a new recipe combination

When LimeWire launched their application, the LimeWire team dressed up in bright green clothes and gave out jars of Nutella, with a Limewire.com sticker on the top, to students at NYU.  They only gave out a few hundred jars, and things grew virally from there (100 million downloads and counting).   I have one question, what would Nutella with a squeeze of lime taste like? (find out here)

• I learned the word “ubiquitous” and got my first taste of the internet at home from AOL

As the price of copying a CD went down, (and I am sure a volume discount was involved), the world saw the AOL free-trial CD as the new software distribution model.  Not to mention some great artwork.

• The perfect tag from Apple

If my sources are correct, the reason Apple is Apple is because no one was coming up with a name, and since apples were Steve Jobs favorite fruit, and, for lack of a better option – ta da.  Putting aside the tribulations with Apple Corps and anything musical from Apple Inc., how great is that name now? There’s an app for that, from Apple.   It is almost like they planned to write software and mobile applications from the very beginning.

• Jerry Seinfeld for Microsoft (and the memorable butt wiggle)

Ummmmm…. yeah, moving on….

• CNN’s exposure of the gullibility of the of the United States

I personally don’t believe this was an advertising campaign to increase software distribution, rather a hard-hitting undercover story revealing that people BELIEVE everything on the internet is true.   The comments really drive it home.  Either way, it caught my attention.  The concept is a silly low budget commercial featuring two guys who created the ZapNewsApp  being foiled by the much better CNN News App.  If you believed there really were two guys being wronged, I am sorry to be the one to break the news to you.

• Digsby Gains Awareness by Advertising on New York Garbage Cans

Digsby created a great following by building an avid community and an interesting ad campaign with eye-catching artwork on garbage cans lining New York’s busy streets.

Ultimately, every one of these companies achieved great distribution for their software, whether we thought their marketing campaigns were silly, lucky, or something else.  If you are looking for a unique distribution model for consumer software, check out W3i.  

Kristin Oberhaus, Product Manager, W3i Holdings, LLC
Kristin has over 13 years of product management experience and is a certified usability analyst. She is an avid believer in pragmatic marketing.

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Software distribution is always a problem that publishers face.  Unless you have a loyal audience that you can market to within your app to gain further distribution, it’s becoming exceedingly difficult to get noticed across all platforms–desktop, browser, social and mobile.  Consider these numbers: currently, there are roughly 12,000 add-on’s in the Firefox add-on gallery (AMO).  In the Android Marketplace, at the end of December 2009, there were 20,000+ apps.  At the end of January, Apple’s App Store had a staggering 140,000+ third party apps available!  The number of desktop apps is in the millions.  Just imagine how these numbers will swell this year alone.  How does a publisher get distribution in a pool so massive? 

Here’s the problem: app stores are not built for software distribution for all publishers.  Only a select few are able to rocket to the tops of the charts and capture users’ attention.  These sites suit the aggregators well as they capture both the short and long tail, but what if you’re at the end of the long tail?  There are many ways to combat this; publishers need to seek more proactive ways to improve discoverability.  At the same time, publishers need to take advantage of solutions, such as W3i’s InstallIQ, that are built around distribution for all.  InstallIQ recommends relevant apps to users when they install comparable applications.  If you’re a publisher and have an app, it’s important to get face time with users.  W3i has nearly 10 years of experience connecting people to applications; that’s what makes us unique – that is our job and mission.  App stores are great for scale, great for the aggregator; but W3i can do what the app stores can’t: provide a software distribution solution that puts your application directly in front of users, out of all the clutter.

Eric Montag, Product Manager, W3i, LLC
Eric is a Pragmatic Marketing Certified Product Manager and uses his experience in internet marketing to lead the charge in product research, planning, and execution from both a consumer and business standpoint.  

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Marketers understand that users want information where and when they need it.  Mass advertising has lost effectiveness because people tune-out when the message is not relevant to what they are doing at the moment. Integrated applications are a key to creating that envied relationship with consumers allowing them to engage with you whenever and wherever. 

WeatherBug®, a brand of AWS Convergence Technologies, is getting it right.  WeatherBug gets up-to-date weather information, weather forecasts and weather alerts whenever and wherever the consumer needs the information and also alerts the user to hazardous conditions.  WeatherBug is now available at their web site, through a desktop app, through a mobile app, through a browser app and even as a Facebook app.  Now that is integrated content delivery. 

Benefits of Marketing with Various App TypesWeb site – Useful when consumer is searching for weather information or knows where to find it.

1. Desktop App – Weather information is available on the desktop.  Great top-of-mind awareness while the consumer is on the PC and makes for easy consumer access.
2. Browser App – Particularly useful for adding browser utility, messaging–think alerts–as well as interfaces with the search experience.
3. Mobile App – Weather information is available when the consumer is away from their computer—on the run.  Mobile apps are great for use away from home/work.  Negatives are the limited user experience and current penetration.
4. Facebook/Social App – Allows consumer to personalize their fan page with the weather.  The goal for social apps is simplicity and entertainment to encourage sharing so the app goes viral. 

No wonder WeatherBug is used by 21.5 million consumers.  Using integrated application marketing to put weather updates where and when the consumer is looking for them is a strategy for success.  Making sure you match the type of app to the consumer usage pattern is just smart marketing.

Deborah Manthei, Director of Marketing Communications, W3i, evangelizing the use of consumer application marketing to engage brands’ essential users.

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I read an article by Steve Smith for MinOnline this week titled, “Vanity Fair Gets Social With Oscar Race iPhone App.”  This article discussed how Vanity Fair was going to capitalize on the Oscar buzz with its Vanity Fair Hollywood Oscar Race iPhone App and how L’Oreal will be the sole sponsor.

This is an excellent approach to application marketing—tagging into major events that naturally get a lot of buzz by providing relevant content and weaving in one sponsor.   This approach gives that sponsor more prominence since there is less advertising clutter. 

The W3i Application Network can be viewed this way as well.  Consumer application marketers with demand for their content sponsor consumer applications during the installation process.  This allows advertiser prominence when the consumer is already installing an application.

The article also discussed another problem with consumer application marketing, namely getting consumers to actually use the app once installed.  Vanity Fair tries to solve this problem using several messaging features:  pop-up instructions when the application is installed to orient the consumer with the app’s functionality and a headline crawl on the bottom of the app to showcase additional content.  Vanity Fair also built in the important “sharing” feature to ignite viral distribution by creating voting pools with groups.  These are excellent consumer application marketing tactics.

To excel at consumer application marketing not only does the app need to get installed, but it must also engage the user.  Providing timely content, ways to discover content and navigation tips are essential for an application’s success.  

Deborah Manthei, Director of Marketing Communications, W3i, evangelizing the use of consumer application marketing to engage brands’ essential users.

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With the recent release of Google Buzz, we have yet another social stream of information to consume.  Google Buzz joins Facebook’s Updates stream, Twitter, Yammer, and, outside of the U.S., Yahoo Meme and various other micro-blogging services.  As there are more and more streams feeding us, it will become more cumbersome to manage and review the data in these streams.  A crowded marketplace of services, while increasing competition (this is good), defeats the purpose of these streams; that is, the availability of broad-based real time information with an emphasis on simplicity.  It could be confusing for users to manage each service individually and that is a problem for apps to solve.

I downloaded an app for my iPhone recently, called Momento.  This app seamlessly hooks up four of my social streams: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Last.fm and presents the information in terms of social events based on the day they occur.  This is all done in a fantastically designed, easy to use application.  Essentially, I see this app acting as a tributary, merging these streams into a river.  The only problem with this app is that it only pulls in my social moments.  It doesn’t allow me to identify or define moments that, while not my moment, are compelling and relevant to me.  This app is making a good first step to solve the problem of too many streams.

Overall, the app market is headed in this direction – the creation of apps that act as powerful tributaries, allowing a user to go to one place to view streams of information in a neatly organized and personal fashion.  All of this solidifies the fact that apps play a huge role in simplifying that information we consume and the way we interact with it.  This is an undeniable fact –the release of the Apple iPad is a testament to devices designed around the utilization of apps.  Given the proliferation of apps in the recent year, apps will provide the solution to the problem of an increasingly crowded marketplace of micro-blogging services. 

Eric Montag, Product Manager, W3i, LLC
Eric is a Pragmatic Marketing Certified Product Manager and uses his experience in internet marketing to lead the charge in product research, planning, and execution from both a consumer and business standpoint.  

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At a high level, the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is fairly straight forward.  This is to say that most people would agree on the concepts and principles behind it.   However, as you dive deeper into the detailed aspects of delivering a system based on SOA, it can begin to mean different things to different people.  Understanding exactly what SOA is, is not made any easier by major players in the software industry like Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle, and more who tend to define or bend the definition of SOA in a way that aligns the principles of SOA with the implementation details of their platform technologies, development tools, and methodologies.  Try entering “SOA” in your favorite search engine today and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.  In this article, let’s take a look at concepts of SOA, examine some of the business benefits, and attempt to come up with an “elevator speech” definition for SOA.

SOA in a Nutshell
SOA is basically an architectural style for building software systems based on discreet but interacting components called services.  Each of these services delivers on some set of specific business functions.  The key with SOA is breaking up a large monolithic software system into discreet services that can be presented to or assembled for the user in different ways to provide a high degree of functionality and flexibility.

Services – The Key to SOA
Breaking up the functions of a software system into a set of services allows the business to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a more granular fashion in order to address new business requirements.  Existing services can be consumed by different business channels, therefore, leveraging existing infrastructure and development investments.  Adding new functionality required by a growing business is a matter of adding additional services rather than rebuilding an entire system.  Modularizing a software system into loosely coupled discreet services is a good thing since it allows us to change the software more easily and respond better to rapidly changing business needs.  Let’s take a closer look at real world business benefits of SOA.

As an example, consider a typical internet store-front system. The shopper is presented with a catalog of items and a shopping cart that the shopper can move items in an out of, and eventually the system accepts an order. The items presented in the store are ever changing. Marketing people are likely to want to change the presentation of items, content of item descriptions, and layouts frequently.  Even the whole shopping metaphor may change from a shopping cart to scrollable item list on a sidebar. Marketing may want to experiment with different fonts, colors, and screen layouts and use various presentation technologies, including Ajax and a myriad of other options. But none of this has anything to do with the core business functions encapsulated by the services. The services that acquire catalog data and submit orders remain unchanged despite all the changes to the presentation of products. This underscores the importance of separation of the underlying business process of processing orders from the never ending changes of presentation.

Beyond constant change with presentation, business processes, change as well.  Offering new types of products or reaching new markets may require adding additional business processes such as currency exchange, age verification, etc.  Meeting the challenge of adding new functionality is more of a matter of adding services in SOA than needing to change major parts of the system.  The bottom line is that the services in SOA do not change that often, but the pathways through these services and when and where they are used, do.

SOA is more than just defining and creating services.  What separates SOA from other software architectures of the past is the way in which services are discovered, understood, and interacted with.

Contracts – Getting to Know Your Services
Beyond defining the discreet services that are capable of working together to solve business problems, establish a contract for each service. A contract states what a service will do for you, information about what is required to use the service, and the rules or policies around security, etc for using the service.  The consumer of the service needs to understand the contract in order to know how to use a given service. 

Messages – Using Services
A message is basically a unit of communication between the service and the consumer of a service.  Messages may take different forms like SOAP, HTTP GET, SMTP or more.  Regardless of the protocol, messages are basically made up of header and a body.  The header provides information about routing whereas the body contains the actual message data.

End Points – Finding Services
An Endpoint is basically an address where the service lives.  In the case of web services it’s a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

On The Elevator
Software architectures are basically defined in terms of their components, attributes, relationships within, and the rules that govern them.  So we can define SOA as a guide for building systems based on autonomous components labeled as services.  Each service is accessed at a known endpoint and exposes its processes and behaviors via contracts which take the form of messages.

The business benefits of SOA can be summed up as providing a higher degree of agility and allowing the business to respond quickly to ever changing requirements of the marketplace while leveraging investments in applications and software infrastructure.

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