PepperJam: Affiliate Marketing Network Review
As many of you guys will know, affiliate marketing is something which I’ve been getting into a lot recently. It’s stemmed a lot from my blogging, where I’ve seen that making mega-bucks isn’t really that difficult once you’ve built up a readership of loyal and targeted visitors, and if you have a product that is likeable and will sell itself.
This sunk in even more yesterday, when I read Yaro’s post on Building a Profitable Email List, where he showed a cheque for over $4000 – made my writing only one blog post, and one email (which was sent to his sizeable list). Thus, when I received a review request for PepperJam network, I jumped on the chance to sink my teeth into another affiliate marketing network.
Who Are PepperJam?
If you havn’t heard of them before, PepperJam are an Inc. 500 company founded and presided over by Kris Jones. Kris has managed to turn this Full-Service Internet Marketing Agency into a world leader, especially for advertisers wanting to showcase their product to a large audience, and have PepperJam’s “Super Affiliates” work their magic in drumming up the sales.
If recommendations by Forbes, Entrepreneur.com and CNN Money don’t mean anything to you, then know that in 2006, PepperJam managed to grow their company by 460.4% and in 2007, this figure rose to an absolutely astonishing 550.2% growth!
Introducing The PepperJam Affiliate Network
As is customary, let’s take a quote directly from President Kris Jones about his new network which was publicly launched yesterday on the 15th January:
Pepperjam Network represents eight years of research and development and the combined ideas, feedback, and intelligence of hundreds of affiliate marketers and advertisers. Pepperjam Network will forever change the face of affiliate marketing by putting power back in the hands of affiliates and advertisers to build long-term, profitable partnerships through better communication tools and transparency.
Above is a screenshot of PepperJamNetwork’s homepage. As you can see, everything is very contemporary with a sleek dark background – and this is a theme which is very much repeated in the backend management side of things too. I love the use of flash too which really captures the visitor’s eye and encourages them to signup as an advertiser or publisher – I suppose the folks at PepperJam are world professionals at making people do what they want though!
Signing up to become an affiliate (which I’m guessing most of you will do) is extremely easy and is a matter of filling in a 1 page row of information fields. From there, all you have to wait for is the go ahead from PepperJam – and you will have access to the Affiliate Management section of the site.
Normally this backend screenshot would be populated with all kinds of earnings figures and pretty graphs. As I’m a new affiliate though, I haven’t really had a chance to start marketing like a true mogul. If you take a look at my Sponsored Banners section though, the advert about SEOMoz is an example of a PepperJam network ad.
7 More Reasons Why PepperJam Network Rocks!
1. The network have already managed to sign-on big brands and household names as advertisers for us affiliates to promote; heard of Blockbuster or Ben Sherman before?
2. PepperJam is so new that only a few people have had access to them and their advertising programs. This means that if you get in on the action quickly, you can start making mega-bucks due to the complete lack of competition.
3. The site hosts in-depth yearly, monthly, weekly and daily statistics down to the T, so you can easily compare your campaigns and see their growth (or apparent failure) by sale or lead summary.
4. Affiliates can specify unique SID’s for each link – which some other networks unfortunately do not have. This allows for more targeted research into keyword and traffic analysis.
5. Whilst browsing through potential products to promote, PepperJam has the technology to allow you to chat with the Affiliate Manager for that specific program. If the blue chat symbol is lit up, then all you need to do is click on it and start chatting away. This makes it great for instant and easy communication – this will set PepperJam network apart from the other networks for sure.
6. PepperJam Ads have also been released. These are essentially blocks of contextual advertising (like Google Adsense) except you get paid on a CPA (Cost-Per-Action) basis, like a true affiliate. If you have a highly trafficked and niched site, you could have the potential to blow other earnings out of the water.
7. PepperJam have also included resources that are available for affiliates to browse over in case they’re in need of some enlightenment. People like Zac Johnson and Shoemoney are amazing sources of knowledge and are thus linked to from the Educational Resources tab.
To Conclude
All in all, the PepperJam Network has taken over 2 years to develop and really tries to address the 2 main problems of insufficient communication and a lack of affiliate transparency. I think Kris and the team have really managed to put these issues to bed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if PepperJam continues to achieve remarkable growth to become the Number 1 Affiliate Network.
