May 2008 - Page 2 of 6 - Sam Harrelson

CJ And NY State Affiliate Tax

Sam Harrelson on May 20, 2008

Commission Junction is currently sending out this very legal sounding email to publishers encouraging them to perform due dilligence with a link to a PDF from NY state’s tax office…

As you may already know, the State of New York recently enacted new legislation that addresses tax registration, collection, and other time-sensitive obligations. As with all laws, this law may or may not apply to you and your business. We are actively monitoring the law and will use reasonable efforts to protect ourselves and our publishers as we deem appropriate.

The application of the law is dependent on particular business and factual circumstances, and Commission Junction is not in a position to provide legal and tax advice regarding this law. However, we encourage you to perform the appropriate due diligence as it relates to your business.

For your convenience, we have provided a link to a memo from the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Office of Tax Policy Analysis, Taxpayer Guidance Division that addresses the new legislation:

http://www.tax.state.ny.us/pdf/memos/sales/m08_3s.pdf

While certainly not as personal and emphatic as ShareASale’s response on their blog or on the ABW forum, it is a little heart warming to see CJ addressing the issue.

I was hoping for more of a “these are the steps we will take to educate merchants and protect our publishers” type email, but it looks like this is all we’re going to get from CJ at this point.

What Happened to Affiliate Bloggers?

Sam Harrelson on May 19, 2008

Last Spring, it seemed as if the world of affiliate marketing would be saturated with bloggers. BUMPzee was riding high and everyone was trading links, trackbacks, comments and bumps.

It was the short lived golden age of affiliate blogging.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great places to read about affiliate marketing such as Shawn Collin’s AffiliateTip Blog, Scott Jangro’s blog, Linda Buquet’s 5 Star Blog, Mark’s 45n5 blog, Zac Johnson’s blog, ReveNews as well as many others that I’m surely leaving out. There are some great new blogs such as Trisha Lyn’s blog, but things don’t feel the same.

However, last year it wasn’t uncommon to get 10-15 “bumps” on a thought provoking post from BUMPzee that made you feel as if something unique was happening in the affiliate blogging space.

And it wasn’t uncommon to see many new and interesting blogs popping up addressing real affiliate marketing issues. Maybe it was BUMPzee’s influence? Maybe it was the market boom last year?

It just doesn’t feel the same.

What happened?

Disqus API Plugin To Be Updated Soon

Sam Harrelson on May 18, 2008

Last week, Scott Jangro wrote a great piece comparing the Disqus API and Javascript plugins for blog integration.

Most people would just scratch their heads and say “so what?” but there are some pretty big implications for the behavior of the commenting plugin and how search engines see blog comments, etc.

“Search engines cannot see the comments rendered with the Javascript plugin. They do see the comments displayed via the API version of the plugin.

The Javascript implementation does have its benefits. In addition to ease of integration and feature updates, the fact that comment text is unavailable to search engines means that comment spam is rendered completely ineffective. There are other ways to accomplish this, and for now, I’m uncomfortable with using a full Javascript implementation.”

Plus, the Javascript plugin has all the new features that Disqus has been rolling out compared to the API plugin which has been seemingly neglected lately.

However, according to a tweet from Disqus’ Daniel Ha, that looks like things will be changing soon.

I look forward to switching over to the API plugin myself!

FeedFront Issue 1 Shipping Soon

Sam Harrelson on May 17, 2008

Missy Ward and Shawn Collins of the https://www.fusionquest.com/cgi-bin/main/hotlinks.cgi?aflt=afc1&client=affsum Affiliate Summit have put together an “offline” publication that looks like it’s going to be a great read based on the talent assembled for the articles.

I contributed a piece describing the best ways to get things done in affiliate marketing using web2.0 tools:

FeedFront Articles in Issue 1 : FeedFront: “Issues will be mailed in June 2008. Here are the articles in the first issue:

* Editors Note: Missy Ward & Shawn Collins
* Five Ways to Evaluate a Merchant’s Landing Page: Dan Murray
* Pros & Cons of Utilizing Multiple Networks: Brian Littleton
* Twitter Grabs Attention: Lisa Picarille
* GTD in Affiliate Marketing with Web 2.0: Sam Harrelson
* Affiliate Marketers Give Back: Missy Ward
* Online Video Advertising: Tim Carter
* Nobody Would Use a Search Engine with Paid Results: Dan Gray
* Building Profitable Customer Relationships by Following These Simple Email Axioms: Tom Kulzer
* Are You the Next Super Affiliate Blogger?: Zac Johnson
* Ad Networks, Vertical Ad Networks, and Affiliate Networks: Peter Figueredo
* Affiliate Manager Compensation: Shawn Collins
* My 3 Favorite Blogs You May Not Visit: Wil Reynolds
* My 3 Favorite Tools You May Not be Using: Wil Reynolds
* Get Off Your Butt and Start Making Videos: Jim Kukral “

You can get a subscription to FeedFront here.

ShareASale On the NY Affiliate Sales Tax

Sam Harrelson on May 16, 2008

Brian Littleton of ShareASale weighs in on how his network plans to address the delicate situation surrounding the NY state tax on affiliate revenues and provides a nice model that other networks may want to consider (both in terms of practice as well as openness with the affiliate community):

ShareASale Blog » NY State and the “Affiliate Sales Tax” Law…: “Our plan at this time, is to treat any case where a merchant wishes to terminate NY affiliates with great care and caution. If a merchant requests to do this, there is little we can do to stop them – but ShareASale will be performing the task so that merchants aren’t accessing information which traditionally is considered private within the network.

There is a chance that this plan will not work. My hope is that we can warn merchants that terminating NY is a bad plan – and one that needs rethinking. If our plan doesn’t work – and we end up needing to provide more information to merchants, we may end up having to do so… I say this as a heads up to affiliates because while we don’t like to give out info, we also don’t want to put merchants in a place that makes it difficult to adhere to the laws of their state or others.”

Great job for addressing the situation and letting us know your thoughts from a network perspective, Brian and team.

RedHatBlueHat Podcast

Sam Harrelson on May 15, 2008

I joined a new political themed podcast with a few friends from the online marketing industry today:

RedHatBlueHat 1: Who’s Wright and Who’s Left? : GeekCast.fm: “This is the inaugural episode of the ongoing weekly political podcast RedHatBlueHat featuring Todd Crawford, Tim Jones, Shawn Collins, Mike Allen and Sam Harrelson.”

The show goes about an hour but is really entertaining and full of political theory and analysis from all sides of the playing field.

Here’s the mp3 or head over to GeekCast for the stream.

Let me know what you think!

kwiry Improvements Roll Out

Sam Harrelson on May 15, 2008

kwiry is a neat mobile based service that I’ve been following lately. In essence, it turns text messages, emails, voice calls, or photos, into online reminders by texting anything to 59479 (k-w-i-r-y).

Those notes, emails, photos, etc can be shared or sent to iCal, Twitter, RSS, Facebook or a user’s profile page for later access. The service reminds me of a cross between Jott and Evernote.

I’ve been using Jott and Evernote (both together and separately) everyday for the last few months and find the ability to create notes on the go, both visually and audio wise, incredibly helpful to my workflow.

So, when I found kwiry I was hopeful that it could do in one application what I was doing with two separate ones. However, the initial limitations of not being able to grab photos and send to my own kwiry page and the lackluster mobile page itself led to some frustrations.

It looks like the kwiry folks have been working on those improvements and they are rolling out to the service. So, users can now take pics on the fly and send them in with a specific email address along with the text and audio notes.

kwiry also has a much improved mobile site at m.kwiry.com with a nice iPhone interface (even though I’m on a BlackBerry, it’s still much improved).

So, with these improvements I’ll probably give the service another shot and see how it can hold up to my Jott / Evernote paradigm. There are still things that Jott /Evernote does better (Evernote has incredible handwriting and tagging as well as a fantastic desktop app for the Mac that I can’t put away and Jott integrates nicely with my RememberTheMilk todo lists and GMail), but kwiry could serve as a nice on the fly notes grabber.

YouTube Insight for Stats

Sam Harrelson on May 15, 2008

For all of you stats monkeys out there who have been waiting patiently to see a geographical breakdown of the viewers of your YouTube videos, the wait is over.

You can find YouTube Insight under your www.youtube.com/my_account page:

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself..jpg

YouTube Insight is fairly simple in its offerings but should be adequate for the needs of most YouTubers. It reminds me of a simplified Google Analytics.

Oddly enough, the majority of my viewers are 45-55 year old males. Darn.

Affiliate Summit Network is a Success

Sam Harrelson on May 15, 2008

This iteration of the Affiliate Summit Network is really taking off.

I think a good deal of its success so far has to do with it being hosted on Ning instead of Confabb as in years past. I love the integration of RSS, Twitter streams, Flickr, YouTube, etc that Ning provides and it makes the entire network feel much more robust and inviting than years past.

There are already over 70 pretty active members (growing daily) signed up and we’re discussing the NY state affiliate situation, how to market to marketers and all sorts of relevant topics that will surely be hot buttons at the conference in early August.

So, if you’re going to https://www.fusionquest.com/cgi-bin/main/hotlinks.cgi?aflt=afc1&client=affsum Affiliate Summit East (15% off if you use that link plus the code ase08afc15), make sure to join up on the network.

And if you do, make sure to add me as a friend.

Alcohol: Cause of And Solution To All Good Mashups

Sam Harrelson on May 15, 2008

A wise man once said, “Alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” If we extend that metaphor to tech, it looks like BeerMenus.com is doing some interesting things with a mashup of local beer menus, Google Maps, dynamic search and RSS:

Bruisin’ Ales Beer Blog: “We love this! In NYC, two disgruntled corporate guys (and brothers) launched a new site, Beermenus.com. Will and Eric Stephens’ site is dedicated to providing beer menus of restaurants in the NYC metro area—’a growing compendium that lists 263 beer menus and 1,386 different beers from pubs around Manhattan and, now, Brooklyn.’ As the popularity of beer continues to grow, this could easily expand into something for big beer cities across the country. “

Right now, this is primarily for the NYC metro area (yet another reason NY is the greatest city in the world), but I hope it expands to include more regions and areas (and develops a mobile app or site).

These sorts of sites could easily add affiliate marketing to the mix and make a ton of money. Hopefully they’ll do that so that the service can expand.