Year: 2007

Wow.

Now this is something to get excited about.

I’ve been a big fan of Second Life for a while in terms of its ramifications for studying sociology and metanarratives. However, it’s hard to translate such interests beyond just describing the coolness factor.

How to relate a platform such as Second Life to online marketing is not an easy task, especially when you are trying to convince the uninitiated. Sure, there’s already an audience of 2.5 million users there, but what does it mean for online marketing, and can you (or should you) really attempt to market to the users? I’d argue yes, but it takes a certain brand of marketing with a good handle of finesse and flexibility and a base knowledge of the pre-existing community.

Now, Linden Labs has announced it is opening up Second Life to coders and hackers everywhere (a la Firefox or Linux)…

Aiming to take advantage of its already-impressive momentum, San Francisco’s Linden Lab, developer of the Second Life virtual online world, will announce Monday that it is taking the first major step toward opening up its software for the contributions of any interested programmer.

The company will immediately release open source versions of its client software for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. In order to enter and move around the Second Life service, users must download and run this software on their computer desktop. But now, says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale, independent programmers will be able to “modify it, fire it up and sign on with it.” The company gave Fortune exclusive access to executives in advance of the change.

This is just the step that was needed to make the platform more accessible, more friendly and potentially easier to grok in terms of how to do marketing on a platform such as this.

Of course, this will take some time to roll out, but expect quick and numerous alterations, split-offs and eventually different “flavors” of Second Life within the coming years (such as how there are different flavors of Linux from Ubuntu to Fedora to Red Hat).

The burning question is when will Wayne Porter and his band of merry men create Affiliate Life (deliberate bait since Wayne doesn’t like the term “affiliate”) for all of us to enjoy??

Here’s the lineage of the infamous “5 Things Blog Meme” in terms of the SEO crowd. I had no idea I could be grouped with SEO’ers.

http://www.soloseo.com/blog-tag-tree.html

I’ve said the whole practice of SEO is almost meaningless in the current market and have been yelled at by a few, so I guess this is guilt by association!

Hasn’t blogging and blogging platforms such as WordPress, Typepad, Vox, Blogger LiveJournal and even MySpace done away with the need for professional SEO’ers? Forget affiliate marketing, Jeff… it’s SEO that needs a serious reconsideration and wake-up call. It seems the entire base of that profession is running off of four year old momentum.

If you do practice SEO, please convince me that it is not completely worthless.

Otherwise, I’ll go on following the data I have and producing good content… which seems to do more for Google or organic rank than any (needlessly expensive) attempt at manipulation of the system.

Many of us have interesting stories to tell of how we ended up involved in the affiliate and online marketing space.

I just had a beyond interesting conversation with a well-known name in our little sphere and we spent a long time chatting about our backgrounds and what got us here.  I’ll post my story in the comments shortly.
How did you get here?

If you haven’t taken the time to grab a pass to Affiliate Summit West at the end of the month, you’re going to have to go to eBay.

Shawn is blogging that the conference has already sold out.

Great news for buzz and for the health of the affiliate marketing industry in general.

See you there!

Nice work, Shawn and Missy.

I’m putting out a call to all forward thinking marketers in the affiliate and online spaces…

USE TWITTER!

Why?  It’s not just vanity blogging, it’s instant communication with power and community.  I’m seeing what other segments are doing with the service, and it’s pretty impressive for networking.

With the Affiliate Summit just a few weeks away, this would be a great tool to keep in touch with co-workers and people you want to meet while on the floor as you can send and check twitter messages from your phone/pda/crackberry.

Seriously… just give it a try.

Here’s mine.  Do with yours what you will, but let’s start a little ecosystem of marketers in our space.

I don’t put a great deal of emphasis or attention on metrics such as page views or feed subscribers. There are much more effective measurements of attention and readership that I’ve developed and use.

However, during this time of blog introspection, some stats are encouraging:

1. Vlad points out in the comments that the site has grown from a Google Ranking of 0 at the end of October (when it was created) to a probable 6 in the next update. Thanks for sharing, Vlad. I wouldn’t have noticed and that made my day. Explaining my excitement to my wife was tricky, however. Keep up the great work on your blog, Vlad… it’s a daily destination for me.

2. Feedburner shows that for first time CostPerNews had 100 active users of the feed in a 24 hour period yesterday. That’s no where near TechCrunch, Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel… but this blog will never see those numbers due to the niche aspect. Having 100 active feed users (along with the other site readers not using the feed) put a smile on my face this morning. Online (especially affiliate) marketing is a small industry, so seeing triple digits in the feed count gave me a definite boost.

3. CostPerNews has had readers from every continent in the last month. Who ever is in Lebanon, TN seems to be a big fan, as well. Thank you Lebanon, TN! Beautiful city. Auckland, New Zealand and Reykjavik, Iceland are two places I’ve always wanted to see (my ancestors were Icelandic Vikings). Thanks for visiting. Can I come visit you?

4. About 57% of you are spending 8 minutes or more on the site. That’s a neat stat because it shows that you’re actually reading the articles and even commenting.

5. Cost Per News’ Technorati rank has been steadily increasing and we’ve been able to maintain a solid position inside the top 100,000 which was my 6 month benchmark. We’re closing in on 75,000 so my new benchmark for the 6 month mark (June ’07) is to be within the top 50,000. Doesn’t sound impressive, but again… this is a niche blog that has a glass ceiling of “page views” and “rank.”

So, thank you for continued visits and input. The last 24 hours have been filled with positive and encouraging emails and phone calls, and I do appreciate those. Stats are fun to review, but rarely tell you much about the actual nature of a blog or a site.

Online marketing is slowly realizing the old paradigms of quantitative numbers don’t equate with the actual quality of a site’s readership or the responsiveness a community may have to certain marketing techniques. For instance, Ze Frank’s community is relatively small by traditional metrics, but incredibly loyal and devoted. I’d rather have that community than a million faceless impressions if I were building a program.

By the way, I’m still searching the job offers and would love to make an announcement at Affiliate Summit later this month. Contact me if you’re in need of someone with lots of experience in this space!

So, the rumors are true.

I am without employment.

I secured an angel investor (and a prominent member of the online marketing community) a few months back who has been keeping me and my growing family afloat while I expound on all things online, affiliate and marketing. However, that arrangement has dissolved and Cost Per Love hasn’t been paying the bills like I hoped it would.

CostPerNews is doing well (check Alexa or Technorati if you’re fool heartedly interested in page views and rank), but it’s not making money. I’m providing consistent daily and high quality content, but no one (besides Shawn and Missy) is paying up. Maybe I haven’t found my philanthropist-in-shining-armor yet, but things are not looking well for the future of this blog at the current pace.

I’d like to keep it going, but funding is required.

So, I have a few questions and I need serious answers asap…

1) Does CostPerNews requisite me keeping it going despite my attempts to stay neutral in tone and objective in nature? In other words, is it worth it for the community?

2) Do you know anyone that is hiring? You’ve seen my content here and at samharrelson.com. I’m a problem solving dreamer who knows how to put the practical to the pedal. If you have doubts, check out my LinkedIn profile.

3) Is there anyone in the space who would hire me and allow me to keep this going? CPA networks, affilaite networks, publishers, online marketers, et al… I’m interested.

People tell me I’m an idiot and that I should charge for the content provided here a la Marketing Sherpa. I don’t think so. I don’t believe that. Information and knowledge should be free and openly available. But I have to eat.

So, please… let me know your thoughts. Or, if you need a problem solving forward thinker (a la Jason Calacanis or Robert Scoble) in your network, affiliate program or marketing platform, please let me know.

Comment below or send thoughts to sam@costpernews.com

Rarely am I as impressed by a new platform online as I am by the new graphical search tool Sidekiq.

Sidekiq is based on Ajax and a few iFrame applications. The great thing about this compared to a Google or Yahoo search is the ability of the subjects of the search to determine their own destiny. Where you are, how you interact and what you do on the web results in your listings. And the listings are thorough.

Some of the categories included in the search are video (YouTube), audio (podcasts), social bookmarks (MySpace, Facebook, et al), employment (my RateMyTeachers.com page shows up), real estate (Zillow, etc), shopping, travel, downloads, movies and a few more.

Results do seem to come from more than just Google as well.

Sidekiq provides an interesting search experience and I highly recommend after playing with it for a few minutes. If only there were a social voting aspect for results, this would be the perfect killer app.  Let’s see SEO tackle this.

Is there still a place for co-regs in the online marketing world?

Now that the $1.25 pay per email and/or zip only offers have finally jumped the shark, it seems that more people in our sphere are re-evaluating the use of registration path offers.

However, international marketers are just beginning to see the boom in the reg path.

Will 2007 bring about an end to the beloved (or hated) platform? With the addition of video and wiser consumers, I think so.  There are some really fun and interesting hybrid reg path technologies coming online this year so stay tuned.

Affiliate Summit is quickly approaching (January 21-23). If you haven’t registered yet, go there now and take care of that. This Summit is going to be well worth your time, money and effort, so make sure you don’t miss it.

Now that the hotel rooms at Bally’s are basically sold out, I think it’s kosher to let you know that Wayne Porter and I have decided to do something a little drastic, crazy and completely unorthodox for this year’s Affiliate Summit West.

Instead of staying at a hotel, we’re going to camp from the Friday to Tuesday during the Summit at nearby Lake Mead National Recreation Area. It’s about a 30 min trip, but I think it will be a blast.

We’re renting a car for the back-and-forth to the conference downtown, so feel free to tag along to AffiliateCamp Beta with us. Anyone is welcome to come out and spend the night with the stars, a nice fire, some strategy talks and a little Hunter S. inspired craziness.

So, let us know if you’d like to be a part of the beta test of AffiliateCamp. This is in no way a profit generating event. We’re just camping out in the desert and giving it a fun name since we’re in town for a conference.

In some ways, this is part of my own attempt to completely open source my life. We’ll see how it goes!

Linda Buquet has posted about the new TUMRI CornerStore marketing widget.

And the best part??? Set it and forget it! Let Tumri take care of everything for you!

I’ll let you read her post for more information, but this is a neat little tool for affiliates to sink their teeth into. It’s only the fourth day of 2007 and widgets are beginning to claim their place as the most talked about new marketing platform this year.

It’s no secret that eBay is doing a number of interesting things with its open API’s and technology platform.

Sharing APIs is common practice for software companies, but eBay, along with its fellow online-retail pioneer, Amazon.com, is breaking new ground in its industry by establishing a large community of outside developers. And the implications of this strategy go much further than the world of auctions and electronic storefronts.

How much is eBay relying on outside developers?

“This a new wave of business,” says [another developer’s marketing director]. “eBay is a supplier, a marketing channel and a competitor. It’s a weird arrangement.”… “If you can’t split it, you can’t scale it,” says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. “We’ve made ourselves masters of virtualization.’ … eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks, adding 100,000 lines of code, all while in use.”

What does all of this matter for online marketing? A great deal if you consider the implications of web2.0 in a practical sense.

“This is what Web 2.0 does for business,” says Infopia CEO Bjorn Espenes. “Everyone can pick and share information in different ways that are much more automated.”

Platforms such as Linux have been relying on outside developers for over a decade, and the result is an impressive number of stable and attractive distributions which are beginning to compete with the traditional OS’s such as Windows and Mac OS.

Affiliate marketing has long been at the threshold of taking advantage of these sorts of open platforms with data feeds and arguably the very affiliate link structure of the market.

If eBay’s continued use of API’s and open platforms and reliance on outside developers and talent is any indication of future trends by software and online portals, affiliate marketing has a bright future.

Just as a reminder, I’ve created a widget that you can place on your desktop or just about anywhere you’d like for CostPerNews content.

CostPerWidget

Takes about 30 seconds to get going, and you can make your own with any RSS feed as well. If you make one, send it over and I’ll feature them in a special section.

You can still join in on the love fest at CostPerLove. Check out the sidebar for more info.

Firefox’s Alex Faaborg has raised quite a few eyebrows with his piece on Microformats and the possibilities that exist for these platforms in terms of browser implementation (Firefox3?)…

4. The Web Browser as an Information Broker (Firefox 3?)

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online.

This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.

While others are chewing on what browser implementation of microformats means for the online experience in general, I have been pondering what it means for online marketing specifically.

First, let’s look at what microformats actually are, as this can be confusing…

One of my online maharaja’s, Chris Messina (check out his post on ebates) says…

Microformats are simple codes that you can use to identify specific kinds of data, like people or events, in your webpages.

Alex points out that microformats are not limited to just addresses or contact info, but can cover a wide variety of topics with relative ease, and allow people looking to easily find the things they are looking for via web searches…

There are lots of different microformats, ranging from very fundamental types of information like contacts, locations, and events, to the slightly more domain specific, like reviews and resumes, to the very domain specific, like wines.

So, if microformats can be used to help others find the content (or offers) you are providing, why hasn’t there been widespread adoption in online marketing? Again, Alex discusses the potential of microformats in an aggregated shopping site…

For instance, if you want to sell something, you can blog about it using an hListing, and a site like edgeio will find it when it aggregates classified advertisements across the Web. Similarly, the microformat hReview allows the creation of review aggregation sites, and XFN (XHTML Friends Network) allows the creation of social network aggregation sites.

Edgeio is just one of a growing number of shopping aggregation sites (think 77Blue or Jellyfish). Instead of going to a centralized hub where users are present in order to show off your offer or product, what if the users came to your site based on a qualified and highly interested search? The eCPM would be enormous if this happened en masse for your program.

Eventually, application of RSS and microformats signals the death bell (it’s not doom and gloom, it’s evolution to quote Pearl Jam), for networks ranging from the big affiliate networks to the CPA networks.

Really?

Yes.

Why?

Just as blogging has allowed content creators to do their creative acts and have the traffic come to their own blog rather than having to post up their content on a large centralized site or forum, widespread implementation of RSS and microformats will allow merchants from the Madison Ave variety all the way to the small merchants depending on CPA networks for volume to publish their goods, services or programs on their own site and have the traffic come to them.

This will not be immediate.

It will be a slow and quiet revolution which will start with the smaller merchants who are innovating and looking beyond the traditional paradigm of partnering with a network and the network’s collection of affiliates and publishers in order to get traffic. These innovators will see the positive results of pull, rather than push, marketing online. Eventually, they will move away from the networks and case studies will be written. As this happens more and more, the merchants on the next rung up will notice the change and start reading those case studies and eventually Madison Ave will figure it out. It will be slow, but it will be from the bottom up. Throw widgets in the stew, and it’s a spicy gumbo for change.

It will change online marketing forever.

It will change affiliate marketing for the better.

Scott Jangro has updated The Affiliate Blog List tool and it now includes the ability to create an account, leave comments and restricts multiple bumps or dumps (and I was just getting the hang of dumping all of Shawn’s posts)…

By adding a social aspect to what’s otherwise an RSS reader, I’m hoping that the truly-can’t-miss posts will bubble up to the top. So if you read a blog entry and like it, give it a bump, increasing the chances that others will see it too.

This is sorely needed.

So, go create an account, check out the site everyday (we all know you visit Digg every morning) and contribute to the community. If enough people start using what Scott has provided, some very good things could happen for both the readers and the content providers… not to mention we just might raise the tide and lift all boats in the affiliate marketing sea.

Is there a listening audience out there for a podcast of five or so forward thinkers in the online marketing world?

Would you be interested in hearing five or seven of us get together every week or month and letting the tape roll for an hour or three? If you’re interesting, you can join in too.

Jeff’s doing his thing with Weekly Insight, but I think there’s still room for something that’s a combination of more esoteric, more practical, more theoretical and more cowbell. This wouldn’t be “re-blogging (to quote Calacanis),” and another top stories type show, but would really provide some valuable content on what might or might not have made the news and the blogs that week.

Comments, suggestions and critiques encouraged.

Make some noise, let me know if this would be valuable and I’ll get put it together immediately.

Lately I’ve had a flourish of emails asking how companies or networks get their offers, CPA networks, affiliate sites, publisher sites or affiliate programs featured on Cost Per News.

It’s easy.

If you have a program, offer or network that you’d like to see covered here (or if you have a tip on one that should be covered here), simply send me an email:

sam@costpernews.com

I’ll take a look at whatever you send over and feature the stuff I think is interesting or noteworthy for the CPN readers.

The number of tips I get on a given day has grown tremendously over the last few months, but I promise to look over your program, offer or network if you send it in.

Valleywag is reporting that video advertising network Eyeblaster has failed to find a suitor.

Eyeblaster, an online ad company which hoped to trump the sales of Pointroll and Klipmart, is off the market after failing to attract a buyer.

Competitors Pointroll and Klipmart have already found buyers (Pointroll sold to Gannett for $100 million and DoubleClick snapped up Klipmart for around $50 million).

Video advertising is the talk of the town in Silicon Valley and Madison Ave.  So why couldn’t Eyeblaster find a buyer?

Will 2007 bring one of Jeff Molander’s 12 Christmas Wishes of a Video CPA Network?

One of the steepest uphill challenges for any new CPA network or merchant looking to establish a certain volume of quality traffic is locating affiliates and publishers.
Finding the right affiliates and publishers early in the process can give the program the right foundation for future growth and become a win-win scenario for both the program and the affiliate as the program grows.

Even for existing networks or merchant programs, finding and keeping quality affiliates can be a challenge.  We’ve seen incentive programs such as cash or prize rewards, along with wine and dining at industry conferences for the top affiliates.

However, recently I’ve helped a few merchant programs locate affiliates using web2.0 platforms including MyBlogLog, MySpace and blogs.  While I initially questioned the type of quality that can be found in such places, the merchants are more than pleased with the new finds, and the affiliates are of high quality in terms of traffic and production.

If you don’t have a recognizable name, brand or affiliate manager in the industry, how hard is it to locate quality affiliates and publishers?

What’s the best way to keep them engaged in your program when you find them?

Will web2.0 platforms begin to help networks and merchants discover new affiliates or publishers?

[NOTE:  Today is a traveling day for me, so there will be light posting.] 

Snap.com is used on blogs such as TechCrunch and ReveNews among a host of others. The search/preview service has even garnered lush praise from the influentials…

“SPA is an efficiency tool – it saves time for the reader, and that’s a good thing for the publisher. I like it so much I put it on TechCrunch”
— Michael Arrington, Editor, TechCrunch.com

Snap.com adds previews of sites linked to from a specific blog or site. I’ve even begun to see affiliates and publishers making use of Snap.com on their affiliate marketing sites.

I’ve resisted using Snap.com here because I’m not sure that the trade off of an inserted bubble over the content is worth it, and I’m not sure if the user actually gains that much from “previewing the site.” Of course, I’m no fan of links either, so I see this as perpetuating the problem rather than relying on users to have their own experience searching for content in a meta-data type of fashion.

Are blog readers, or perhaps consumers using affiliate sites with the Snap.com code inserted, appreciative of the service? Does it provide a useful tool or is this another intelli-text?