Month: January 2007

Yahoo has a nice looking widget blog that it does a horrible job of keeping updated and current. Let’s face it… widgets are hot topics and Yahoo should be taking enormous strides to let people know what it’s doing behind the scenes to improve widget adoption and user experience. Yahoo has invested heavily in widgets by buying Konfabulator and there are currently about 3700 widgets that the Yahoo engine supports. Why aren’t they blogging more??
Then again, judging from the quality of posts, it’s probably a good thing they don’t update the blog frequently.

Nonetheless, they show some promise of actual insight and suggestions for new widget users with today’s post.

So, which Widget platform should you use?.

The simple answer to that question is “it depends”.

What are you trying to accomplish? How much (or little) power do you need? Will it be a web-only Widget, or will it run on the desktop? Do you have existing code you want (or need) to reuse? All of these factors can influence your decision.

and later…

Why choose a desktop Widget?

The advantages of a desktop Widget over a web Widget include:

Lives outside of the browser
Access to local resources
Potential for offline use & background downloading
Greater interaction with the rest of the system through standard desktop interaction.Desktop Widgets blur the line between the web and the desktop by pulling the content out of the browser and integrating it into your desktop.

Within the world of desktop Widgets there are several choices.

Apple Dashboard
Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar
Google Desktop Gadgets
Yahoo! Widgets (Konfabulator)

Good stuff, Yahoo Widget Blogger (the author is “Ed”). Keep it up.

There’s going to be an incredible need for widget insight, information and tutorials as more people switch to Vista (and as more Mac users begin to make use of them). Vista is pushing widgets heavily as Gates and Co. attempt to bring people back to their desktop and away from life-inside-the-browser (or GoogleLand as I refer to it).

Loren Feldman hates “social media.” Why should you care? Because he makes good points about crowd mentality.

I would get into semantics and explain how social media and wisdom of the sheep/crowds are two different things, but it’s irrelevant to the point he’s making. He does make some very valid points about the place of creativity and individuality. Of course I strongly disagree with him on some issues, but you’ll have to make your own mind up on where you stand.

I think the categories he uses below the video are the best part. Ze Frank? Mark Cuban? Nice.

The following link may contain strong language, tattoos, gold chains, half naked unshaven men and vitriolic hyperbole offensive to some viewers and will make any children nearby cry (and pay no attention to his LinkedIn or MyBlogLog links on the right or the YouTube logo in the video)…

Loren Feldman on Social Media

Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins and I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the usefulness and potential monetization of inventory made available by users tagging content on today’s AffiliateThing podcast, but we should have. We covered widgets and general monetization strategies for web2.0, and tagging is a key component of such a strategy. Shawn and I did play a “word association” game, and that should have been my opening to hop into a short tangent about the power of tagging, or the power of allowing users to tag.

Tagging is nothing new in terms of concept, but web2.0 platforms such as Flickr, YouTube, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and even our own beloved BUMPzee community have opened up the world (or at least the online world) to the power of tagging (or “labeling” as it is called in Google Reader, Picasa and GMail).

In effect, tagging enables end users to classify and partition content according to their own word associations. While a seemingly minor and semantic point, tagging has an incredible potential for any type of program, because it places the power of classification in the hands of the user, rather than artificially imposing classifications of date or categories by an authority.

Merchants are using tagging, but what I’d really like to see in affiliate marketing is a network that allows affiliates and publishers to tag offers within the network. That way, when an affiliate logged in to a network, they wouldn’t have to sort through the hyper-confusing maze of CJ or DirecTrack navigation, but could quickly and efficiently get to the offers they had previously tagged by just a few keystrokes. It’s a seemingly small tweak, but it could make the world of difference for your program. Affiliates could even share their network offer tags on their own blogs or sites via something like a del.icio.us tag cloud, thereby promoting the network to an even larger audience. Win-win.

Expanding the scope a bit, there is an interesting report out by Pew Internet research shows that 28% of internet users have tagged something…

Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information.

A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

The report features an interview with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

28% of internet users. That’s huge.

Tag indexing search engines such as Tagbulb are popping up to serve the need these users are developing and established sites such as Technorati are heavily reliant on tags.

If you’re a merchant or a network, brainstorm ways to implement tagging features and options for your end users. You’ll see the difference quickly.

View PDF of Report

Only two things in online marketing are certain: high conversions and net 15 payouts.

Wait… that’s not right.

I meant to say taxes and server crashes.

If you’re an affiliate, you should have received a 1099 form for each network or merchant that you’ve done over $600 in business with by Thursday February 1. If you’re a network or merchant, you need to make sure that you’ve got your 1099’s mailed out.

From the Wikipedia entry on 1099’s:

A notable use of Form 1099 is to report amounts paid to independent contractors (in IRS terminology, such payments are nonemployee compensation). The ubiquity of the form has also led to use of the phrase “1099” to refer to contractors themselves. U.S. tax law requires businesses to submit a Form 1099 for every contractor paid more than $600 for services during a year. This requirement usually does not apply to corporations receiving payments.

Many businesses and organizations must file thousands of 1099s per year. Thus, payers who file 250 or more Form 1099 reports must file all of them electronically or magnetically with the IRS. For further information refer to Publication 1220, Specifications for Filing Forms 1098, 1099, 5498 and W-2G Magnetically or Electronically or Publication 1187, Specifications for Filing Form 1042-S, Foreign Person’s U.S. Source Income Subject to Withholding. (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1220.pdf) The IRS no longer accepts 3 1/2-inch diskettes for filing information returns, and is phasing out other magnetic media. Electronic filing will soon be the ONLY acceptable method to file information returns at its computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

I’d argue that we all need an educational discussion on this topic because it’s becoming more and more complex to follow the rules due to affiliate marketing’s increasing reach beyond just revenue sharing. For example, a current thread over at ABestWeb is discussing the validity of claiming PPC losses on individual taxes. Interesting.

Some hosted solutions such as MyAffiliateProgram are even offering to handle the composition and delivery of 1099’s for partnering merchants, making the whole process a little less painful and time-consuming. That’s an very valuable and mature business selling point.

Carsten Cumbrowski has posted some helpful info here and here is an interesting thread discussion from ABW in 2002 about 1099’s and Linkshare.

So, what do you say, Shawn? Affiliate Marketing and Taxes discussion at the next Summit?

How much trouble do you have to go through to follow the tax rules?

Have affiliates adequately figured out the proper procedure for claiming earnings and losses?

Wow.

May I take a minute of your time to give you thanks?

I can’t tell you all how much I appreciate the amount of visits since CostPerNews officially launched back on November 1 of 2006.

In fact, we’ve grown by leaps and bounds.

We’ve actually grown so much that on Saturday night at 2am I was awaken by a call from my trusty hosting company, LivingDot, with a warning that CostPerNews was within a few megabytes of going over its bandwith limits for the month… which was something I hadn’t planned for this early.

So, I’ve doubled the bandwith for the site in order to keep this from happening again while CPN continues to grow. However, I simply cannot tell you how incredibly happy I am to have around 300 active daily feed readers along with a Google PR of 5 and a Technorati rank within the top 40,000 this early. For a blog only three months old, those are impressive numbers, and it’s all because of you.

In other words, please keep commenting, emailing and letting me know ways to make CostPerNews a better site. Bandwith is not cheap for someone who is attempting to make all of their income from a blog, so if you have any ideas on improvements we could make or would like to contribute to the CostPerLove fund, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

This is not a fluff piece.

This is a post about a great experience with a network sign up process that I’d like to share because it’s valuable.

I’ve gotten quite a lot of feedback through emails concerning the post about merchant or network sign up programs. I said that at the moment CJ was my favorite sign up process.

Interestingly enough, I had more than a few people email me about my omission of ShareASale’s sign up process. They were all quite vehement in their insistence that ShareASale has the best network sign up process for affiliates and publishers in affiliate marketing.

I’ve had a ShareASale account going back a few years, but not one for CostPerNews. So, the SAS team allowed me to go through the sign up process again to check out their process and sign up for CPN.

I’m impressed.

Honestly.

CJ’s sign-up form is more exhaustive up front and less friendly (how far along am I??) than the ShareASale signup…

The ShareASale signup process takes 5 steps and is rather painless, and even friendly, in its orientation….

The process goes quickly, seems to be less intrusive and really does encourage accomplishing a goal. As humans, we are built to accomplish tasks. Putting a visible “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” at the top really does make a world of difference. We play video games, we sift through emails, we collect money… and we love to accomplish goals. Take a hint from the SAS sign up process and keep the sign up process in a very visible “above the fold” situation. In other words, scrolling down during a sign up process is not a good thing.

CJ does an efficient job of collecting information and data right away and making the sign up process easy.

SAS does a great job of collecting data, keeping you on track and helping you feel as if you’re accomplishing a task. So, I was wrong. My preference for a network sign-up page at the moment is ShareASale.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in emails… now put your comments in the forums!

Anyone have any CPA networks with decent or good sign up forms?? Even if you’re a representative of that CPA network, let us know.

Which affiliate network, CPA network or merchant affiliate marketing program has the best sign up form and process?

My vote at the moment goes to Commission Junction.

When will the sign up process in affiliate marketing be revolutionized… or at least changed? Of course signing up for a program should require a level of strictness to insure quality and reliability. But let’s face it… in affiliate marketing the sign up process is threatening, boring, dull and laborious. Who wants to join a network with a sign up process straight out of Bedrock?

I know that the sign up process costs many programs at least a few dozen or hundred affiliates every month. Just imagine what people new to the affiliate world must go through when they encounter a DirecTrack sign up process.

If they could all just be as simple, friendly and complete as Google…

Do you know how many potential affiliates you are loosing during the sign up process on your network, program or merchant site??

(AdSense doesn’t count for your answer of best sign up process, so don’t even think about using that!).

Some of you may be confused at first by the connection of the following points with affiliate marketing. However, affiliate marketing is (or should be) constructed and confined within a relationship. That relationship can exist between you and one other person, or between your company and thousands (or millions) of people.

However, the base foundation for what we do in this business is the factor of relationship. In particular, if you are an affiliate manager, how well do you know your community?

One of my personal heroes (I’m sure she hates that title… oh well) is Tara Hunt. Summing up Tara’s career is close to blasphemy since she’s been involved and instrumental in so many things, but to be succinct, she is formerly with Riya, currently with Citizen Agency and instrumental in such post-Cluetrain movements as Pinko Marketing (of which I’ve been tagged as a member according to Shawn, Wayne, Lisa, Jim, Carsten, Linda Buquet and numerous others at the Summit).

Tara is contributing to the The Future of Communities Blog, which is a companion community blog (similar to ReveNews) to the upcoming Community 2.0 Conference to be held March 11-14 in Las Vegas this year. She raises a few incredibly interesting points in her first post, which I feel are particularly signficant for affiliate marketing (especially for affiliate managers)…

Personally, I think Community has turned into a garish buzzword, leading hungry marketers by the snoot down a new path of public/commercial boundaries being crossed. The outlandish ad budgets of yesteryear aren’t producing the same back-patting kudos and are looking more like cultural pollution than future award winning art direction. Word of mouth, itself, turns out the same reactions as those clever viral campaigns: an eyeroll at best. Marketers, desperate to keep their Madison Avenue jobs and yearly jaunts to Sundance, are finally ready to “take the precious time needed” to build a community behind their brands.

But we aren’t. We are marketers. Would we give a flying snake about Shari’s kitty photos if we didn’t want to sell her a new car? Would we hang around MMORPG’s all day long waiting for a customer to walk into our lame store ’cause we enjoy it? No. And no…I don’t know the majority of the people on this list, and I’m sure you are all well-meaning wonderful people, but I do know that we are all marketers. We are paid to help our clients sell stuff. And the more we tiptoe around that fact, the more dishonest this industry becomes.

Agree? I do. Affiliate marketing, in particular stands at the crossroads of having to decide whether it will continue to be a community/relationship based model of marketing and advertising or whether it will follow the path of lead generation and pure performance automation. It is a difficult choice depending which lens you (or your employer) chooses to look through. The key is that you do have a choice, and the immediate ROI lens may not always be the best choice for your program.

Tara goes on to write something that every affiliate manager needs to read, memorize and hold close to their heart…

I know that somewhere inside our desires to prove the ROI on community to our eager clients, we know the answer. It’s pretty simple. It’s where we as humans start and customers / consumers / users / community-members / call-us-what-you-will end. We can and will reach deep inside of that part of ourselves (which we are first and foremost) and empathize with the fact that entering someone else’s personal experiences and trying to sell them something is uncool. We have to be willing to lose ourselves to the community. We need to become community advocates. We need to reverse the line of communication and bring word back to our bosses and our clients that their products are hurting the environment, exploiting labor, not acceptable to be tested on animals, falling apart, causing addiction, causing health issues, hurting our children, driving us further apart, etc. We need to protectively bring the soul of the community back INTO the organization and change things…not collectively go out, infiltrate and sell things.

Yes, there is a changing role for marketers. I believe in the future, we don’t work for brands and companies, we work for customers.

Imagine an affiliate program with an affiliate manager that took that seriously. There are a few that do, and I imagine in just a few years there will be dozens more.

What are you doing for your community today?

Leave a comment here or over at Tara’s blog and share your point of view…

Is there such thing as an “exclusive offer” that only one network has access to distribute to its publishers or affiliates?

I’d argue no.

In order to be a true exclusive, a network has to basically create an offer in-house and brand it with either a partner brand (unlikely for most networks) or create a brand to superimpose on the generic exclusive offer’s backend. In this case, if a network creates such an “exclusive” and it is successful, nothing prevents a competing network to quickly develop a similar offer and impose a new brand on top of that one. This is what most networks have attempted to do when creating “exclusives” to lure in new publishers or affiliates.

I argue that it’s not the offer’s exclusivity of style that can achieve that goal, but the brand exclusivity of an in-house offer.

For instance, take the FreeSlide $1.00 pay per email (and later zip) offers that originated with the AdDrive network and quickly spread out through the CPA network world like a fast growing wildfire. FreeSlide as a brand may have been an exclusive, but there were so many knock-offs so quickly that the exclusive nature of FreeSlide quickly vanished. What remained was the brand, which did prove to have staying power and put AdDrive on the map.

In that way, AdDrive figured out how to monetize and attract new publishers with offer brand , rather than just with offer exclusivity. The fad has now passed and FreeSlide is not accepting new signups, but the brand exclusivity is permanently ingrained on the brains of every one in the email marketing world.
The trick is not to establish a unique in terms of function, but establish a unique in terms of brand. That is the selling point that many small CPA networks seem to be missing, but if they were to start thinking of creating ways to insure the long term benefit of a certain in-house brand, rather than trying to out-do competitors with payouts, they could also find the sweet spot of offer creation.

On tonight’s episode of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert issued a $5 challenge (in the spirit of Microsoft) to the first person who changed the definition of “Reality” on Wikipedia to include “Reality has become a commodity.” I’m posting this about 2 mins after he issued the challenge, and I’m sure it’s already been accomplished. The Wikipedia watchers are going to have another long night (or morning on the other side of the pond).

However, reality is not just about our phenomenological experiences. It also encompasses our daily interactions with other humans and technologies. Affiliate marketing is a facet of that reality for most of us and for millions of users who don’t realize that they are participating in “affiliate marketing.”

How should that reality be defined? Should it be purely a commodity based reality? Or is there greater value in helping your visitors, customers or users realize that the reality of affiliate marketing interaction they are participating in with your site is not just a commodity… it is also a relational experience in which they can share, learn or grow as a human.

How to do that?

It greatly depends on your program, site or shopping cart process. Whatever your case, I would start with a the realization that relationships can make you money (if that’s what your ultimate goal is), and work from that point of realization. Try out things to accomplish that goal. Value based relationships want to occur… so don’t hold them back behind a commodity based fence.

I think there’s a great deal of value in allowing for a deeper level of affiliate marketing reality which transcends the artificially imposed boundaries of pure commodity.

Most of you are familiar with larger CPA networks such as Azoogle or CPA Empire, but should you be looking into the possibility of working with CPA networks that are smaller in scale?

What about Rextopia, MarketLeverage or LevelClick?

I asked Lindsey Kane of IceWaterMedia‘s CPA network LevelClick about such differentiating factors and why publishers or affiliates should consider working with their network rather than a more traditional affiliate network (CJ, Linkshare or ShareASale) or one of the larger CPA networks.

Here is her response:

“We have several exclusive offers that you can not find on any other network. Also, all affiliates and advertisers receive a subscription to “Lindsey’s List” which is our weekly newsletter. In addition, we offer a wide range of tools/campaigns for contextual marketing which is our specialty.”

How important are “exclusive” offers to recruiting affiliates? I’d say they can help build a network’s brand, but they are definitely not selling points for a network in a crowded marketplace.

However, Lindsey’s other two points about “Lindsey’s List” and helping affiliates and publishers with their contextual marketing via unique tools or campaigns are unique and potentially valuable selling points for LevelClick. These are the types of services that the smaller networks can provide for affiliates and publishers, and a reason to at least investigate a possible relationship.

The idea of an email subscription which takes the normal affiliate newsletter to the next level (affiliatenewsletter2.0?) could, with the right content and community development, become an extremely beneficial differentiating point. Publishers and affiliates, like most merchants and networks, enjoy putting names with faces. Newsletters with personalities can fill that need (think Adbumb a few years ago). Nice idea, Lindsey.

Helping affiliates and publishers consolidate or improve their contextual advertising programs can also gain a network a friendly reputation and increase word-of-mouth buzz about a certain affiliate manager or network.  Affiliate marketing and even email marketing is about relationships… affiliates and publishers will be much more inclined to work with people they respect and learn from.

Of course, there is no secret formula for determining which networks or merchants you should partner with if you are an affiliate or a publisher. Nonetheless, you should continually seek out new partners and investigate what is going on in the space around you.  Contact LevelClick or Rextopia or MarketLeverage and see what they can do for you.  Finding the right network or merchant to partner with early can be incredibly valuable in the long run, so keep an eye out and do your homework.

Right Media’s RMX Direct for publishers network has just completed a six month beta test and is opening to the public this morning. RMX Direct for Publishers is a simple and free solution for managing advertising networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites by placing ads from partnering merchants and program sites.

One of the differentiating factors of RMX Direct is that it’s built for publishers who sell their advertising primarily through multiple ad networks. The acknowledgment of the economic reality that publishers are working with various networks to fill their ad inventory (whether it’s email, website placements or registration path placements) presents a different outlook than most competitors in this space who unrealistically hope to reign in publishers in a binding partnership which offers little room for a fluid relationship.

At the moment, RMX Direct is working with nine other networks. RMX Direct allows a publisher to create competition for their ad inventory by letting them create direct relationships with those nine ad networks that are participants in the Right Media Exchange. In addition, publishers can increase the competition by adding in additional ad networks such as AdSense, YPN, and Valueclick.

Michael McNeely of RightMedia writes:

“These networks see the characteristics of each ad impression such as the user’s geography, frequency of ads they’ve viewed, and more. They bid in real-time what they’re willing to pay for each impression based on those characteristics. Additionally, publishers can add any ad network they already work with to the competition, guaranteeing that RMX Direct will only earn them more money than they are making today.”

This idea of an exchange aggregation point for a number of networks is a unique twist on the CPA/affiliate network space. Right Media even has some big names giving endorsements for the program as a result. One of those is Matt McAlister, Senior Product Manager for Yahoo who writes:

“It’s plenty robust enough to serve any small publisher’s needs, and some of its clever capabilities may prove useful to large publishers as well. You get a simple self-serve ad management system where you can drop in new creative including ad code from your ad networks like YPN or AdSense or even Feedburner. I’ve also loaded in a house ad. It took only a couple of minutes to setup each ad. Then you get your Right Media ad code to post into your web page templates. Done.”

When asked for a few stats or number from the beta test of RMX Direct, RightMedia responded with these numbers:

– Over 11 billion ad impressions served
– 3.75 billion ad impressions served in the month of December alone
– Over 16 million clicks on ads
– Over 300,000 conversions
– Over $1.4 million in publisher revenue run through RMX Direct
– 750 publisher accounts
– 350 discussions started in the community forums

Interesting. Particularly interesting in my opinion is the inclusion of the “350 discussions started in the forums” stat. Most web2.0 companies collecting beta test data don’t even keep track of that metric, so it is impressive to see an online advertising networking placing value in the community forum discussions going on about the product.

Is this type of partnering aggregation exchange network a sign of things to come as platforms and traditional advertising networks continue to fragment as publishers search for the best use of their ad inventory? I think so.

Andy Beal has launched an online marketing job board as an addition to the Marketing Pilgrim blog…

Andy has partnered with JobThread.com on the site for the backend, and initial job listings include the likes of Microsoft, iProspect, High Rankings, SEO Inc, Channel Advisor, The Rimm-Kaufman Group and Fox Interactive Media.

Nice work, Andy!

YouTube rockstar Shmuel Tennenhaus gives an account and analysis of all the recent YouTube news (Fox sues over episodes of 24 and Simpsons appearing on YouTube, revenue sharing with content providers, new search capabilities, Google enhancements) with his own flavor of commentary…

“Jack Baur is a badass”…

Many of us have played with the beta versions of Microsoft’s new OS, Windows Vista over the past few months. However, what features or potential issues in the operating system might give affiliate marketers a headache or reason to cheer?

Granted, affiliate marketing is an online business, so it would seem that an offline operating system would not interfere with what happens in a customer’s browser. However, Vista has (fairly) integrated the offline with the online and the blend may end up providing new challenges or cheers to those of us in the online marketing sphere.

So, here are some of the features affiliate marketers need to be aware of in Vista… particularly in the internet browsing (IE7) portion of the OS…

• RSS. It’s too early to tell if Vista’s IE7 integration of RSS feeds into the browsing experience will bear much fruit for those of us who have been preaching from the mountaintop about the benefits of RSS for affiliate marketers and merchants outside of pushing offer updates to publishers. There is real gold in growing a large and responsive customer base through RSS… and it’s much cheaper and much more effective than email.
  
  
• Security. Networks such as Linkshare and Digital River’s oneNetworkDirect have begun to move beyond the cookie, but how will Vista’s new security features impact programs and networks (the vast majority) which still rely on cookies for tracking and stats.

• Search Box. Vista has integrated a search box into IE7, similar to Firefox. Will users stick with the Google option or begin to use other search engines or platforms (such as Amazon, Wikipedia) which are built into the drop down options. How will this affect organic search, AdSense, keywords and even SEO?

• CSS, HTML and email. Vista’s new version of Office will put restrictions on the amount of code that can easily pass into a user’s Outlook inbox. While not every affiliate marketer or merchant relies on email, most of the newsletters I receive from networks, merchants and affiliate programs are loaded with html and tracking code. Impact?

• Widgets! Vista is encouraging movement of web browsing onto the desktop in forms of widgets. Watch to see how many users adopt and start demanding these services. Wayne, Carsten and I have been debating how to implement widgets into affiliate marketing, and Vista could change the conversation completely.

What did I miss? What has been put into Vista which should be noticed by affiliate marketers for good or for bad?

In preparing for an objective post on this week’s release of Vista and its potential impact on affiliate marketing, I decided to visit Microsoft’s newest attempt at tapping into customer generated buzz… “Show Us Your Wow.”

Microsoft is using the “Wow Starts Now” as it’s catch phrase for Vista similar to its other less-than-catchy “Welcome to the Social” for its Zune player (I hear “The Social” is a nightclub in Toronto…).

In my attempt to pull up www.showusyourwow.com, I was greeted by the unfriendly “you are not using IE7, so none shall pass” Black Knight (I even tried using my wife’s laptop which runs Windows but the same result with FireFox there)…

I know you are a business, Microsoft. I understand that you have to put up gate keeping Black Knights to force people to use your products, because if you let choice enter into the market you would sink rather quickly as a business. But at least let us poor Firefox users experience the WOW as well. It looks fun judging by her expression. I promise I won’t sneer (too much).

[EDIT: Just found out that ABW is discussing the issue of FireFox’s compatibility with Vista here.]

Scott Jangro’s BUMPzee affiliate marketing community has continued to grow and improve since its official launch about a month ago.

Now Scott has upped the ante with a plugin that can be placed on affiliate marketing blogs, which allows readers to “bump” a post right from the page where they are reading.

I’ve installed the plugin on the permalinks page here at CostPerNews. So, click on an individual post’s title to see the widget in action…

The number of users who have created profiles and actively use the site has grown to 144. While a small number, those 144 include many of the top minds, affiliates, merchants and networks in the affiliate marketing space. In this type of community, exposure to 144 of the top movers and shakers in the industry is highly valuable. I anticipate that number will continue to increase, but I can’t imagine a more high quality group of affiliate marketing professionals.

If you haven’t checked out BUMPzee, I do recommend browsing and setting up an account. The quality of content there is superb and will only continue to grow as the site itself reaches more and more readers and users.

Me.dium is a new service which makes use of our base and primal need as animals to share our experiences. Blogs do this, emails do this, and conversation through language does this.

However, there hasn’t been a scalable and measurable way to adequately determine the value of this human instinct we all share (even we only children who are shy and prefer our “alone time”).

Since affiliate marketing is best described as a relationship focused industry, it would be highly valuable for affiliate marketers to be able to quantify the social nature of traffic.

Me.dium might be a step in that direction.

In the real world, the people and activity around you constantly effect your decisions and behaviors.

No one has ever been able to benefit from these environmental influences online. Our current online experience deprives us of the wisdom of crowds and the day-to-day interaction that happens between strangers in the real world.

Me.dium reveals the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. Without having to do anything differently than you normally do, Me.dium shows you your online world and allows you to communicate with friends and others in a natural, contextual manner. It lets you see what else is around you and relevant based on what you’re doing – all in REAL TIME. Just like the way you interact in the real world.

What I think is valuable is the concept behind this plugin. In my opinion, this is World of Warcraft guild communing and socializing meets social shopping sites such as FatWallet or ThisNext. In many ways, this type of application democratizes the traffic pattern and allows users to influence their friends and others in a paradigm that models real life.

Interesting concept.

I was invited to a private beta for Me.dium, so if you’d like to try the service, let me know and I’ll send over an invite as well.

More from Jerry Paffendorf here and Ajaxian here.

In a move that is not altogether unexpected, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley announced at today’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland that the wildly popular video sharing site will begin sharing revenues with users…

“We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.”

Given that YouTube videos are now being included in search results on Google, this seems like a wise move to keep users and high traffic YouTube celebs (such as the beloved Shmuly Tennenhaus) happy.

YouTube competitors such as Revver or Mangnify.net already have revenue sharing programs in place, and have also emphasized the use of distributed video through widgets and on site video. YouTube also has its share of distributed video placements, but the amount of traffic hitting the YouTube homepage far outweighs that of its competitors…

Of course that is an Alexa based ranking with no inclusion of widgets and distributed placements of videos, but the graph serves to illustrate the point that YouTube gets much more traffic to its portal site than any of its competitors combined. How will the rev share platform affect Revver or Magnify.net?

Will users turn over control of their content provided at places like Revver to make more money from the amount of traffic that YouTube receives?

Is this a potential hint of imminent things to come with Google’s coming contextual video ads on its search pages?

Don’t put your best content or offers behind a fence.

Let users interact with your best content, your best offers or your best ideas in the open. Of course, that’s dangerous. However, no one said winning is easy (channeling Jerry Maguire).

Learn to embrace the challenge of challenge and open your affiliate program, affiliate site, or even network to the scrutiny of the masses…. it might just make you a better online marketer.

Thanks to Asa Dotzler and the Firefox team for sending over the t-shirt and showing some love…

You guys rock. Keep on changing the world, one browser at a time!

(I’m still waiting on my PodTech shirt, Robert!)

I’m seeing more and more affiliates attempting to monetize the registration path of their offers before the traffic redirects to the merchant or network’s offer page. A few “affiliate gurus” at the Affiliate Summit were even prescribing a complicated version of this method to “better monetize traffic.”

I’m not comfortable with this approach, and find it incredibly disruptive for both the visitor, affiliate and merchant.

How are merchants combating this sort of tactic?

Email has some serious obstacles in the current marketing context:

Spam.

Bounce backs.

Blacklists.

Near zero open rates.

Poor conversion rates on those opens.

Is email still worth it?

Yes.

However, you have to develop a highly relevant and involved format, rather than just an announcement of new programs, coupons or special deals. Those are wonderful “call to actions,” but they are not going to cause your customer base to open an email.

Instead, allow for full transparency and let readers/customers/users know the benefits of subscribing (beyond “GREAT DEALS AND HOT NEW COUPONS!”). Use email like you use your blog (don’t have one yet? tsk tsk… set one up over the weekend). Make email an involved conversational point that readers will want to open.

There’s a powerful place for brand advertising inside of an email.
Speaking of blogs and emails… who would be interested in a weekly or monthly CostPerNewsletter digest with extra content?

Last week, Wikipedia enacted a “nofollow” format, effectively cutting off any credit for outbound links from the popular user generated online encylopedia.

Now, there is discussion as to whether or not other popular, yet easily “gamed” social networking sites will follow Wikipedia’s lead and implement their own nofollow policy. This would help to ease the strain of spam and gaming that occurs on sites such as Digg, Reddit, TailRank and even TechMeme.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks raises the issue of Digg enacting a nofollow policy and what ramifications it may have on attempts to game the social news site in order to receive increased traffic and better search rankings…

So my question is… should Digg do the same thing? When I look at the upcoming stories in Tech News (the biggest category), the posts come in like hot cakes. Besides the fact that so many are duplicates, how many are there for the sole purpose of gaining more inbound links.

I think going nofollow may remove a good bit of the “corporate” spam we see on Digg. Will people still spam Digg in the hopes of hitting the home page? Yep. But it may help deter users who are using Digg for the sole purpose of gaining inbound link traction.

Inevitably, these sites will seek an easy way to curtail the rise of corporate or adsense-farm driven spam that dilutes communities, frustrates users and drives down the value of a social platform. Even tag spam is becoming a problem for these sites and the core users of the platforms.

Will the nofollow inertia continue over into blogging, social search (think Sidekiq or the coming Jimmy Wales powered Wiki search)? If more of these social media sites see nofollow as the solution to the spam and “gaming” problem, how will SEO ultimately be affected?

When CostPerNews officially launched on November 1, two of my five one year statistic goals included crossing a level 3 Google PR rank and being within the top 50,000 blogs on Technorati.

I’m proud to say that within three months, I’ve met those two goals and the site is now a level 5 on the Google rank and ranks in the top 40,000 on Technorati. I don’t give a lot of credence to page view metrics, but the Google and Technorati ranks are not just about page views. They also represent consistent quality and lots of discussion. I think we’ve achieved some of that here on CostPerNews.

So, to celebrate, I’m pushing CPN out of “beta” and into a more stable backend. I decided while I was at it that I would give the site a complete redesign. If you’re reading the feed, please visit and let me know what you think.

Click around, see what you think and poke holes in the site structure (Jangro). Let me know what I need to improve, what you like, what you hate and what I can do to continue to make this an interesting space for discussion and investigation.

CostPerNews, like life and our conceptions of online marketing, is a constant work in progress! I’ll be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 over the weekend, so a few more tweaks will be coming…

(Thanks for the Love, Carsten!)

Google continues to pour on the Checkout blitz.

Now, products from companies affiliated with the Checkout service are denoted in the top “sponsored links” area with large Checkout images.

I’d love to see data on the effectiveness of these buttons (considering Google isn’t a fan of publishers using images to draw attention to AdSense contextual ads)…

Here’s an image…

By the way, Tim Storm from Fatwallet directed me to a fantastic laptop case that I’d like to purchase. If anyone has an eBags affiliate link they’d like for me to use (or a link from a competitor with similar products), send it over and I’ll use it for the case I want to purchase (and for future purchases). I know that’s not always kosher, but we’re all friends here, right?

Popular sites such as Time.com, Dow Jones Market Watch, ZDNet, TechCrunch and GigaOM utilize the Sphere widget in order to allow users relevant and personalized search platforms based on their own interests and reading habits.

I’ve just partnered with Sphere to also implement the widget here on CostPerNews to help facilitate conversation and promote good content. I consider Sphere a cross of StumbleUpon and Technorati with a dash of Techmeme thrown in for good measure.

What I do enjoy about Sphere, and the reason I encourage all of you to use it, is the fact that smaller blogs with less traffic but higher quality are easily discovered using Sphere. About a third of the feeds I subscribe to are a direct result of my use of Sphere. These are blogs with well constructed and highly interesting content about Sumerian archaeology, string theory, pencil fetishes (I’m a pencil/pen collector), and of course, online marketing and the social web.

To get the Sphere widget placed on your site is a complicated process involving personal emails with the Sphere team and a regular check of the content you are producing. This is especially true for WordPress blogs. That does help keep the quality of “sphere’d” sites high, though.

So, give Sphere a go and enjoy some new blogs you haven’t found yet.

I’ve also installed a button for the Jaxtr service over on the far right sidebar. The service is still in an invite-only private beta, but I’ve enjoyed the tests I’ve been running through Jaxtr. Basically, if you have VOIP set up on your computer, you can click to “call me” on my mobile without having to go through Skype or a similar service. Behind Jaxtr is a founder of LinkedIn, so I have faith in the service.

Jaxtr is intended for the MySpace/Friendster crowd. When you contact a person through the Jaxtr button on their site, neither the caller nor the recepient of the call has their number displayed, so it is ideal for some types of affiliate marketing programs as well.

Yes, I know it is problematic for some to throw out that kind of immediate access and contact (my number is 803-413-6834 for good measure), but when I’m not at my computer, I have my mobile with me, and it’s a convenient way to reach me.

So, give that a try. It’s for you to use and abuse as you see fit (though please do more of the former than the latter).

Let me know if you have any other ideas to make this site the best possible place for discussion and information!

Sam

In my spare time (all 10 minutes a day of it), I have been working on my Japanese, which along with the mobile marketing presentation at this year’s Affiliate Summit West by Linkshare VP Karen Verelly, has me thinking…

When will mobile infiltrate the US to the point that mobile users begin purchasing things through mobile auctions?

Will it take a mobile eBay with PayPal mobile? Or a GooglePhone pre-loaded with Checkout and Google Buy (or Google Auction)?

I think it will rely on the divorce between the hardware makers and the service companies. The iPhone partnering exclusive with Cingular (AT&T) was a major step backwards when it could have driven the mobile marketing revolution here in the US.

What is Linkshare doing to make this sea change happen sooner than later?

Think of:

Obopay

UnwiredBuyer

ClickandBuy