Recently I was doing a market research on eCommerce trends in 2009. One of the things we should expect is that customers are more cost-aware and every minor thing they get for free or with a discount is often worth more than a brand they’ve used for a certain time or even a popular and reliable brand worldwide (we’re talking, of course, about similar features of the products being compared).

Of course, discount coupons are not a new technique for affiliate marketers, but in the near future we could easily foresee an abundance of promotions, discounts – let’s call them “deals”.

Picture taken during the "Casual Drinks with Avangate" Business Networking Event

I am sure that many of you participated to a wide range of events and noticed some good or bad practices.  I have recently been involved in organizing a business networking event for Avangate US office, so I put a lot of thought in it and also gained access to all stages of business event organizing, including feedback from participants.

In this post I will share some ideas from my experience as a business developer – ideas that work for a great networking event; in fact I think that these are the most important steps that must be completed to achieve the success and reputation you are targeting by organizing the event.

1. Have a self-explanatory name

Here in Silicon Valley there are tens of events daily. For the audience is quite difficult or time consuming to identify the right events if they are called like “Technology tools” or “International roundtable”; technology for what? Roundtable of whom? That’s why some events have audience and others have not.

What’s the one thing your startup needs more than great code, a killer marketing message or a compelling offer? Attention. Without attention, no one will know your startup has created the must-have web, desktop or mobile app of 2009, or that you even exist.

So how do you get attention? In this post I’d like to suggest 3 ways to get attention when you don’t have the kind of money it takes to hire a great PR firm with connections that will do more than spam every online writer with a heartbeat and an email address.

Be an expert – and share that expertise.

Two recent examples of this. First there’s Amy Hoy, who with her husband Thomas (script.aculo.us) Fuchs and two partners recently launched freckle time tracking. In early January as step one of her getting attention of her target market segment – developers and web designers – campaign Amy released a free ebook on credit card processing. Now this is one of those boring, utterly necessary subjects that a free ebook with great presentation + good graphics + humor + sourcecode is irresistible linkbait. And just to add value, Amy’s now working on version 2: a great reason to share your email even if your inbox is already stuffed.

Most of you are already accustomed with URL address shortening services. You know, those websites which make your URLs short and ugly so you can post them on Twitter, Facebook or just send them to a friend. The thing is you never know where these links end up and how much traffic they drive. For me, working in web analytics, not knowing something like this is itching like hell, so I have decided to find a solution to it.

Tackling the problem

What I did is create a special GreaseMonkey script for Firefox (you need to have GreaseMonkey installed), which offers the possibility of adding Google Analytics variables in order to easily track all the users clicking on the short URL you are just about to generate. Here is how the the new http://is.gd homepage will look like after you install the script.

I remember from my early days as an affiliate that waiting for the commission check to arrive, then cash it in were amongst the most annoying things of the affiliate marketing business.

It was annoying because you had to wait for the money to re-invest instead on focusing on growing the business. Wire transfers sometimes are subject to high banking fees.

Even with PayPal (PayPal made things slightly better for the affiliates), you still had to withdraw the money to a card (and that added some more fees) or to a bank account. My time working for software vendors showed it was quite the same for software vendors – waiting for the check to arrive or paying wire transfer fees.

This is a guest post by Neil Davidson

Walking round Times Square last week, its 23-story billboards reminded me of the extravagant uselessness of peacock tails. It’s an advertising arms race for our attention, locked in an ever-escalating stalemate of mutually assured distraction. Despite passing through it three times, I can remember only one advertisement:

Sure, this advert is big, but it’s not its size that’s impressive. It’s how it’s different that stands out. Charmin have spotted that the 150,000 “eyeballs” that pass through Times Square each day aren’t worth squat, but that 150,000 daily butts are. It’s a demonstration of how advertising matters and how, even in the clutter of Times Square, it’s possible to stand out. Not by being bigger, or brasher or brighter, not by sticking to the measures that your competitors define, but by being different, by choosing a different axis to be judged on, by redefining the rules.

As Seth Godin says, you should create purple cows: products that are remarkable. Products that people want to talk about. But no matter how hard you try, your cow doesn’t always end up purple. Sometimes you’re stuck with a product that is merely good, or a product that people simply don’t want to talk about. Like hemorrhoid treatment. What do you do then?