-16 degrees today in Boulder, CO.  That’s cold.

Normally this is a good thing for the ski mountains so they can begin getting dumped on by snow which brings the skiers and boarders out.  This year things have been down a bit as the economy rears its ugly head.   People are holding back spending on big ticket items and stashing away disposable income.  They’re looking for value, deals, areas where they can save some money, redeem loyalty points for xmas presents (if you haven’t, this is an easy way to knock out some gifts!)- anything that adds value to their lives.

Promotional campaigns present a good opportunity for advertisers to give a little and consumers get a little.  They are easy forms to complete and attractive promotions.  Rewards Today has been giving away 100GBP every Friday in our Christmas promotion!  Great for email, display/social media, search and text links.

Lets face it, it doesn’t sound like the best way to make money, in fact it makes me want to go get a vaccination shot. But viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others. This can create the potential for exponential growth in the messages’ exposure and influence. These strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, and even millions.

Off the internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. Viral Makreting is here to stay. You might as well start up today or be the last one in the pack.

Did you know that Intela is now performing better A/B testing on several of our hosted properties? This procedure allows us to more accurately measure how changes to our offers impact their response rates.

In the past, we’d create different versions of landing pages and data collection forms in effort to improve conversions. The problem was, however, that we’d send one list to one version of an offer, and another list to a different version. We weren’t able to rule out the possibility of the traffic source being the variable affecting performance. Was it the creative changes or the characteristics of the different list of users that made one version convert better than the other?

We’ve recently taken steps to minimize the impact of this variable by employing a “traffic splitter”. This is a simple block of code that takes incoming traffic and diverts 50% to one version of the offer and 50% to another.

We’re then able to make small, incremental changes to creative, copy, and form presentation to better isolate which of those changes impact the offer’s conversion rate.

Voila! Ever-better landing pages.

Our team attended the A4U show last year and they definitely felt it was worthy enough to return and actually exhibit this year. Their efforts paid off!

The show was a great success for our entire team. It also was educational for our newest UK team member, Thuy Pham, to take part in the Intela exhibiting experience. Jim and Jen and the rest of the team met a lot of new clients and made really great connections.

Thanks to all that made this a worthy show and we look forward to seeing you all at other shows around the globe!

Unlike the Colorado Rockies who are now sitting out the MLB post-season, Intela’s October has been action-packed. Between the opening of the Intela-West office, the expansion of our UK business, and the landing of some great new brands, our team has had a lot on our plates. It all adds up to a great month for Intela, not unlike the Rockies’ 22-game winning streak to get to the World Series last year.

Intela Properties has settled in to their new digs just up the street from the main office. After setting up shop, Properties rolled out Intela’s new coregistration publisher platform. The boys have been hard at work for several months to come up with a utilitarian method of streamlining our coregistration path. The result is a sharp new site that walks publishers through a user-friendly experience in setting up our offers. The new site will help Intela roll out new coreg offers to our publishers with greater ease than ever before.

On the UK front, Intela’s presence on foreign soil has increased as well. With more expansion soon to come, our Beatles-esque-reverse invasion of Britain means exclusive partnerships with UK advertisers, exclusive offers for our publishers, and lots of trips to the local pub! Intela recently signed a deal to be Accident Advice Helpline’s exclusive carrier in the UK. This top-performing offer is only available through Intela at the highest payouts. We are on the prowl for more exclusive relationship so that we can continue to expand our stable of great CPL, CPS, and CPC offers. Apply to run this at CrispAds.com.

The Sales Team has been able to offer some of Intela’s most successful offers ever this month from brand names such as Mazda, Coca Cola, Nike, and Citroen. Presenting great offers to our publishers has always been Intela’s goal, but bolstered by internationally recognized brand campaigns, the Sales Team has surpassed expectations. These new campaigns definitely lend the brands’ legitimacy to the online marketing game and Intela is proud to be at the forefront by offering the absolute best to our partners.

Intela definitely can declare October a rocking success. We look forward to closing out the month on these highs and carrying the momentum into November.

Intela is exhibiting at the A4U Expo in London, England on October 14^th and 15^th. Attending the Affiliate Marketing Conference and Exhibition stationed at Stand #37 are: Jim Mansfield (Intela’s CEO) Jennifer Mansfield (Director of Business Development), Arikka Greene (Account Executive), and Nela Collins (Systems Analyst). Also attending the show is Thuy Pham, Intela’s newest addition to the UK-based team and first local hire in London.

If you’re interested in meeting up with any of our team, please email appointments@intela.com. Hope you all enjoy the show!

It’s not really a surprise that online retail sales have increased each year since 2003. You may wonder if this is just a phase and it will come to a halt at some point. But there really is no end in sight.  For those in our industry, the question is: “How do I capitalize on this trend?” First off, let’s focus on unique items not sold in stores. Every kid wants that first new toy before all the other kids. Didn’t you want to be the cool kid on the block with the flying helicopter? Not the the kid playing with the same Stars Wars toy all the other kids had. (That’s assuming you weren’t in a cast from busting your butt on that new skateboard like me). You can find those hard to get items online for sure. Which means there are promotions for those items all over the internet.

Second factor to consider is larger name brands. Every year, online stores like Macys, Nordstrom, Target, Best Buy and even Amazon offer free shipping. Some outlets even offer free gift wrapping as a bonus. It’s come to the point that some stores are promoting online sales only this holiday season. Therefore brand marketing is made simple. The work is practically done for you.

Experts are predicting an online sales growth of 20% this holiday season. Bottom line is… how are you going to take advantage of it?

CrispAd’s Lead Generation network is a new service from Intela, LLC designed to help publisher’s monetize their websites, registration paths, and build custom hosted CPA offers.

CrispAds ensures that every lead a publisher sends is delivered. If a lead buyer’s system is unavailable, CrispAds will automatically retry the leads until they are delivered and credit that publisher’s account. If an error occurs, we will batch the leads to the advertiser and credit the publisher’s account.

We understand how valuable your impressions are so we’ve used custom technology to implement the lead buyer’s filters into our system. This gives our publishers real time results they need to optimize their impressions. By scrubbing and validating leads in real time, CrispAds can not only ensure optimal lead quality for lead buyers but also give publishers the feedback they need.

Our reporting helps you monitor and manage accounts and budgets. It also gives you insight into the current state of your lead allocations. With detailed tracking, CrispAds allows you to optimize your marketing efforts. In the event a lead is rejected, a detailed reason is always given and you can download those leads from our interface for further review.

Publishers are invited to learn more and sign up at our CrispAds Lead Generation network.

At Intela, we have a small and powerful team that’s dedicated to the best thing in business… You! In this industry you can find shady clients offering you unreasonable payouts, false promises, and unrealistic goals. Not here. Intela offers a level of honesty and pride that is above most. We strive to do what’s best for you, what’s easiest for all, and what makes sense. It is a lot to claim. Some may call it gloating, but I, a veteran of only seven months, call it beauty.

Why should clients have to deal with a headache and the worries of the nitty gritty? They shouldn’t. They don’t have to. You don’t have to. We do the work for you by bringing you the best campaigns at the best prices, minus the games. Let your only worry be about which wonderful offer we are going to bring you next, not whether the price we give you is fair.

In just two and a half months, we have added 10 more employees to our team in the U.S. This is just the beginning of the growth Intela is to see in the future. We added people to several different departments including: IT (Ross Gardner, Isac Kalloor and John Bullock), Production (Kim Anderson), Sales (Loren Zimmerman, Candice Silverman and Bryan Richey), Email (Jamey Young) and our newest department, Online Properties (Scott Mitchell and Ed Wince).

The anarchy isn’t just in the US; we have now brought it to the UK as well. In order to keep the momentum going, we need great people to work in the London office. As of right now, we are looking for Affiliate Managers and Client Services representatives. If you are one of these exceptional people to fill these roles, check out the full detailed description. We are very excited about the opening of the London office and encourage all to check out our new UK site. The office is coming together nicely but will take more time and effort from all Intela employees to generate success. Be on the lookout for more updates on the progress of this terrific new move and the people who will be joining the Intela team.