Month: December 2006

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Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille released the second episode of Affiliate Thing today.

The show started with the latest buzz about the Federal Trade Commission potentially regulating affiliate marketing, and moved on to sending out gifts to business friends at Christmas, an interview with eBay affiliate manager Lily Shen, the next issue of Revenue magazine, and a charity fundraiser at Affiliate Summit.

The interview with Lily from eBay is particularly interesting. I’ve been watching their API technology since discussing all things mashable with eBay’s Alan Lewis at last summer’s Affiliate Summit East.

eBay is doing some interesting things on the affiliate side and seem to be more amenable to the affiliate industry than Google (considering the Checkout situation at the moment). Lily even stresses the importance of relationships and communities in building eBay’s present and future success, which was nice to hear.

Shawn and Lisa seemed more comfortable with the format and the conversation at the beginning of the show was entertaining. It’s a good listen and seems that the quality will continue to improve each week.

On next week’s Affiliate Thing, a mysterious Mr. X will be giving an interview. My money is on Molander.

Who knows… Shawn might even end up with a coveted monkey phone call from Porter on next week’s show.

Here’s the mp3 of Affiliate Thing 2

Phase 2 of the Cost Per Network, a finalized and full feature functional Cost Per Jobs, is almost ready to roll out for the public. The plan is to unveil the complete interface for the Cost Per Jobs service on Friday. I’ve put a ton of work into the site, trying to make it as intuitive and user friendly as possible while still retaining enough functionality and depth for users.

There will be two main sections – one for job seekers and one for those posting jobs. Job searches can be made by location, keywords, types, requirements, etc. The search functionality is very deep, and that is the place where we’ve put the most work into making the site different from other solutions.

The beta tests have proven successful so far, and we’re still kicking the tires to make sure that everything loads quickly and correctly.

So, if all continues to go well, the new interface will replace the existing one this Friday.

Thanks to everyone who has helped in the testing and those of you who have sent in emails giving quality suggestions about what you’d like to see to make this a valuable service for the online and affiliate industries. Let me know if you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see included!

Phase 3 of the Cost Per Network should be rolling out sometime around Affiliate Summit West, so you’ll be hearing more about that soon 🙂

Network Solutions, best known for their domain registration, SSL certificate technology and web hosting launched a new CPC platform, PerformanceClick.

“We’ve found that most businesses find the process of running successful pay per click advertising campaigns to be very complex and time consuming,” said Champ Mitchell, chairman and CEO of Network Solutions.

“That’s why our team of online marketing experts will do the work for them by researching and selecting the right keywords that help maximize sales on their Web sites.”

The service is similar to other CPC platform where a company pays a monthly amount for a number of clicks every month and consultation on how to maximize the result of their ad expenditure across the channels associated with CPC.

Scanbuy, a six year old mobile marketing company has secured $9 million in Series B funding from Longworth Ventures.

Scanbuy’s technology allows consumers to access mobile commerce and mobile marketing services in a simple and intuitive way. Scanbuy’s barcode-capture technology and services platforms are designed for handset manufacturers, wireless carriers, content providers and retailers to enable swift navigation from the handset to the physical world. Scanbuy is widely acknowledged as the leading solution provider in this emerging market which displays strong growth potential for the consumer wireless market throughout the world.

The funds will escalate growth of Scanbuy’s go-to-market efforts, extend its standard 1D and 2D bar code technology leadership in mobile marketing, and expand its operational capabilities to support growing worldwide adoption of the company’s solutions designed to provide a range of information and services to consumers via their mobile devices.

Along with news of their increased funding, Scanbuy also announced the appointment of Jonathan Bulkeley as Chief Executive Officer.  Bulkeley oversaw barnesandnoble.com through its initial phases into it’s IPO phase.  He also has experience with Sparks Network, IGN and AOL.

Mobile bar scanning technologies continue to amaze me.  When will the affiliate networks start promoting mobile coupons that could be sent from one phone to another?

We’ve all played with Panama by this point, but yesterday the service launched to the general public (without much fanfare or blogging coverage)…

BURBANK, Calif., Dec 12, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that its new search marketing platform, known by its code name, Panama, is now available to advertisers that wish to open a new Yahoo! sponsored search account. Beginning today, U.S. businesses of all sizes can sign up online to begin marketing their products and services through Yahoo!’s easy-to-use, completely redesigned system.

Previously, the system was only open to Yahoo!’s existing search marketing customers that wanted to transition from the old system over to the new platform.

Yahoo is slowly moving over all existing search customers to the new platform. Project Panama does seem to be successful in streamlining Yahoo’s search offerings. However, I’m not sure how much of a dent even an improved Yahoo service will cut into AdSense. One contact referred to this as “Yahoo’s Zune compared to Google’s iPod.”

Have you played with Panama yet? Impressions?

During his “Lighting Round” picks last night (December 12), CNBC’s popular stock analyst and personality Jim Cramer included a short quip about two of online advertising’s biggest players…

aQuantive (AQNT): ‘AQNT and VCLK … These are companies that help the digital media transformation.’
ValueClick (VCLK): ‘These are companies that are beneficiaries of the fact that TV and radio and newspapers are losing… they’re winning.’

His comment on Cisco during that same segment was also interesting…

Cisco (CSCO): ‘ They’re best in show.’

I was hoping for more detail from him on his predictions for ValueClick. Their stock continues to soar after a downturn in July. They are attracting more and more attention as online advertising continues to eat into the once hegemonic grip of traditional styles of marketing and show increasing signs of ROI and flexibility.

Could this be signs of a major acquisition in the space in near future?

[Disclosure: I do not own stock in any of the companies above and this is opinionated commentary, not advice on stocks that you should purchase. ]

The Washington Post reports that the FTC is getting involved in the PayPerPost debacle…

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.

In my opinion, this should be a self-regulating and self-cleaning mechanism built into the world of online marketing. We should have the ability, and the foresight, to see these types of marketing schemes for what they are… manipulation marketing.

However, considering how vocal some “marketers” are about sketchy practices such as AdSense arbitrage, splogs, and the the inability of reason and the common good to control the market for the benefit of everyone, it seems that the FTC has to get involved to reign in the craziness. Pay per content schemes, whether they be explicit or tacit are not healthy for the blogging scheme, and do not provide bloggers and individuals with a long term sustainable way to make a living.

Provide good content, write about what you love and the traffic will come. You don’t need high stakes SEO or short term pay per post schemes to make a dollar, or an impact, in the blogging world.

So what does this mean for affiliate marketing?

Are links dead?

Jason Calacanis’ keynote from this year’s Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is worth a listen or two. Done in an interview style with Danny Sullivan, the keynote has been made famous for it’s “SEO is bullshit” declaration. While that is an interesting point to ponder, some of the other statements Jason made caught my attention as well. For example, near the end he says that his personal motto might be “make it suck less” in terms of internet platforms and programs.

Here’s the link to the interview in mp3 (made available by WebMasterRadio).

Jason got me thinking about my recent launch of CostPerJobs. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into the backend of the site and service, and I hope it shows when the site makes its formal Debutante Ball appearance (I’m from South Carolina where we still have such things).

When the formal interface makes its debut, I want the site to be something useful. I’m not as interested in monetizing the site as many people in the industry tell me I should be, but I’ve often considered job listings and helping connect people or businesses needing quality help with the people in online marketing who could provide that quality as lacking. Having been in the position of trying to find the next forward thinking company from an employee point-of-view, I know that it is lacking.

So, in order to make CostPerJobs suck less (even though you won’t see the completed project until Friday), I’d like for your help/input/insight into the following questions or any other topics you can think of to make this a valuable resource for our community:

• Should I charge a fee for listings or make it a free service?
• What features would you like to see on CostPerJobs (RSS, email subscriptions, keyword searching, etc)?
• Should CostPerJobs look like CostPerNews or should it have its own distinctive appearance and interface?
• How much of a role should automation play?
• How could this site best be utilized for the improvement of our community?

Please share your feedback. I’m not interested in making millions or thousands off of the site, but I do want it to serve as a needed resource in our industry and community.

Come to think of it, use this as a chance to tell me how to make CostPerNews suck less. If there’s something you don’t like about the site, or something you wish was here, don’t hesitate to post it in the comments or send me an email.

Thanks so much!

This is not too surprising in my book judging from the popularity of platforms such as GMail, feed readers, social bookmarking sites and social networks…

Fifty-seven percent of 1,100 surveyed respondents said they would provide demographic information in exchange for a more personalized online experience, and 34 percent of respondents said they would allow sites to track their clicks and purchases.

What do you think?

(Thanks to Jeff Doak for the tip.)

Google blogger Matt Cutts has responded to criticism that Google blatantly ripped off a Yahoo promotion page for the download of IE7 in a blistering detail of how Yahoo has taken liberally from Google’s own AdSense templates in the design of their own promotional ads…

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

However, this situation points to something endemic to our current American society based on our cookie-cutter educational institutions which are producing citizens with the skills to know how to cut and paste rather well without the ability to think creatively and critically. This sort of copying occurs more than frequently in affiliate marketing, whether it’s campaign creative, network interfaces or promotional materials. So, let’s all use this as a reason to look at our own programs and discover how we might be able to do something a little differently than how everyone else is doing, whatever your rank in online marketing.

Both of these companies are stocked full of highly intelligent engineers and designers, so let’s all shake hands and go our separate ways making the web more Ajaxy…