Instant Internet Business

Shawn Collins: Thank you to Todd Crawford from oneNetworkDirect. He's the Vice President of Sales and Business Development. And just last night, he won the Legend Award for Affiliate Marketing, the Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend Award, and congratulations on that, Todd.

Todd Crawford: Thanks. It's a real honor. I was very, very pleased to have been nominated and to have won.

Lisa Picarille: So, I guess now we're going to find out what's going on behind the legend. What makes him a legend? So, maybe you can start off by telling us how you got into this for the folks who don't know.

Todd: Well most people probably know me best from my days at Commission Junction. I started in '98 with that company in Minneapolis. Most of what I was doing was sales. So, I was selling to merchants.

And I really didn't have to deal directly with affiliates. But because it's such an important part of the business, I was interacting with them on message boards and events. So, I kind of got a name for myself.

I guess it eventually evolved into kind of being seen as the face of Commission Junction. I think that's probably what I'm best known for.

Shawn: So how long was that, that you started at Commission Junction?

Todd: '98 until March of 2006. I kind of got to a turning point in my life and felt like I was never going to leave or I would have to leave. So I decided to leave and take a little break. And now I'm at Digital River.

Lisa: So, tell us what you're doing at Digital River, what your responsibilities are.

Todd: Well, Digital River is a leading global e commerce outsourcing company. So, they basically provide the e commerce infrastructure for large software publishers that write software like Symantec, and they also provide marketing services.

So, oneNetworkDirect is the affiliate marketing service for our clients. So, our network is based on software publishers, and we don't really sell anything other than that.

Shawn: For the show here at Affiliate Summit, do you have any new news for that company. I know you have the new name.

Todd: Yeah, we were just oneNetwork. We didn't own that domain, and we were on a sub domain of Digital River. So we finally got our own domain. We got onenetworkdirect.com.

So we re launched on that domain with a new website, home page, look and feel. It's beautiful. I didn't do any of the work, but it's really, really turned out great.

We also launched a new affiliate interface, cleaned it up, made it look more like the home page so it carries a little more continuity, and launched some new features, like improved reporting as well as which also includes product level reporting and then also a new product called trial tracker.

And what trial tracker is, is the ability for affiliates to promote free trials of software, that you can download for free obviously, and then it'll embed the affiliate ID into it. So it doesn't need a cookie to track it later. And that way if the consumer wants it on their desktop, if the consumer ever buys their software, the affiliate is the only one that can be credited with it.

So we just launched that technology and we're getting our first offer up from Web Root this week, actually, in the middle of a bunch of email strings we're trying to get that out.

Shawn: Do you have any feeling for what the future holds for affiliate marketing?

Todd: Well it's pretty interesting that you know when you look at it from '98 '99 '00, it's so dramatically different. I really love the industry because it's constantly evolving.

I think affiliates are known as the innovators out there, and that's what keeps it moving forward. I don't know if I could predict anything specific, but it's going to be exciting to watch.

Lisa: Are there any particular areas that oneNetworkDirect is concentrating on?

Todd: Well because we only work with our own clients, our big focus is really on the affiliate side of the business. In my previous job I went out and sold to merchants. I dont have to do that anymore. Its really about affiliate development. Thats what our whole, really, team does.

So its great to not worry about the merchant side of the business, and really just focus on recruiting and developing relationships; providing them with the tools that they want.

Were launching more Web services, as well as the recent product features that we released.

Shawn: Well great thanks a lot, Todd, and congratulations on your award.

Todd: Thanks.

Lisa: Thank you.

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