Year: 2009

Commission Junction Affiliate Network Affiliate Managers

Commission Junction, or CJ, is the largest of the major affiliate networks out there. If you are looking to launch a new affiliate program on CJ, or currently have one, it’s imperative that you have good affiliate managers in place. Merely having a program live on CJ is not enough to guarantee your affiliate program will perform like it should. You need excellent affiliate management in place to work with the affiliates and make sure their every need is taken care of. Proactive affiliate management is the best way to increase the affiliate participation level in the program, and therefore the revenue it produces. Having knowledgeable affiliate management help to increase sales because more affiliates have a chance of producing, once worked with. Make sure to have really good affiliate management in place when you run a CJ program to ensure your affiliate program will reach its fullest potential!

Blog Outreach: 8 compelling reasons why you should be doing it now

Blog outreach involves communicating with bloggers to engage their audiences with your message. Bloggers are online influencers, and the best of them are prolific writers with a dedicated readership. Bloggers value relationships and will respond well to companies and individuals who reach out to communicate with them and do it the right way. Until recently it was innovative, at this point it is a necessary part of any ongoing marketing or public relations campaign.
Blogger outreach can be as simple as getting them to review your product or as involved as building an extended relationship with bloggers in your field that you can consistently give stories to and get feedback from.

1)Increase Sales- Good product reviews on the right blogs will lead to more sales from that blog’s readers. There are respected blogs in every field and thousands of readers who use the web to research their purchasing decisions-
2)Increase traffic- A review on a blog that ranks well in search engines is a powerful and effective way to increase search traffic. Since the reader is already online, they are just one click away from your product, a huge advantage over a product review in printed media.
3)Improve Search Engine Ranking- More links to your website will increase the search engine position of your site. This will help people find your product online directly through search engines.
4)Lead the Conversation- If you are not leading conversation in your subject area someone else will be. By reaching out to bloggers, you can start the conversation and make sure you are there to comment, respond and take part in whatever direction it goes.
5)Build Relationships- Reaching out to bloggers will help you build a relationship with the online influencers in your market- and that will add value and presence for your company in the online space.
6)Valuable Feedback- Engagement with your audience will lead to useful feedback for your company. If you are reaching out to bloggers, you will certainly get feedback from them. Even more important, you will get the extended feedback and exposure from their network through social media channels and blog comments.
7)Get the Jump on Competition- You should be building relationships with the blogging community before your competitors do. The online community knows what companies “get it” and who is good at
8)Follow Your Own Lead- If you have read this far you already know you need to do blogger outreach. You are getting guidance from a blog right now- the people you need to reach will do the same.
No matter your reason or duration, understand that blogger outreach is building a relationship. Bloggers respond well if you communicate with them as individuals, not to being on an impersonal mailing list. It’s best to learn something about their blog before contacting them and have a good idea of what they write about and their perspective.

Murray Newlands on blog outreach.

Holiday eCards Just Got Easier and Better with pingg

I wanted to let you all know about Experience Advertising’s new affiliate management client: pingg.com.

Just in time for the holidays, this service allows you to send ad-free
custom designed / branded eCards to your customers, suppliers etc… it also includes a branded eCard web site where you can post interactive content like photos and videos, and integrate your twitter stream etc…it’s really freakin cool. You should check it out.

I know a few people traditionally find eCards cheesy, but this is done *right*! Save a few trees, time and money, and check it out here.

Their affiliate program is available through the CJ affiliate network: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2838046

Thank you,
Evan

Experience Advertising Ranked #1 Affiliate Marketing Company

Experience Advertising has been ranked the #1 affiliate marketing company by topseos.com, an independent online marketing review website. Experience Advertising is an outsourced affiliate management agency or OPM focused on growing affiliate programs for Advertisers on the major affiliate affiliate networks. Experience Advertising manages both large and small Advertiser’s affiliate programs primarily on the Commission Junction affiliate network, but also manages programs on Linkshare, Shareasale, and Google Affiliate Network.

Experience Advertising uses personalized affiliate management techniques to connect with their affiliates to increase production. They also have a philosophy of actually doing the work for the affiliates, such as composing original content and helping launch niche sites and blogs free of charge. If you are interested in growing your affiliate program to it’s fullest potential you should definitely check out Experience Advertising.

On Page SEO: Online Marketing’s Building Blocks

On Page SEO: Online Marketing’s Building Blocks
2009 Update: Changes You Need To Know

Search engine optimization comes in many flavors, but marketers must think about more than on-page elements and old best practices. Good on-page SEO is only part of the solution you need to attract quality visitors to any type of site. Good SEO is the heart of online marketing. Poor on-page SEO will cause any site’s efforts to crumble in other areas.

Marketers should already know about page titles (aka title tags), alt image text and font decoration. An online marketer must be able to speak with absolute conviction about the characteristics of these and other influencers.

A wise soul described search engine optimization as a predator and prey game where the search engines show just enough about ranking factors to aid their mission, but not enough so that the results can be gamed. As search technology changes, marketers must also quickly change.

Consider these 2009 changes to on-page SEO so far:

Changes To Previous Best Practices: After an off-the-cuff (that’s how it seemed from the audience at SES San Jose 2007) remark about “no follow” links, Google announced in June that this type of “page rank sculpting” was unnecessary. And in October, Google pulled “PageRank” from its Webmaster Tools console. Why? Google says it’s a good indicator to use as a success metric any more.

Google also confirmed in September that meta keywords convey no search ranking attributes. A month later, Yahoo said the same, but then admitted a week later that it assigned a weak ranking signal for meta keywords.

To reduce duplicate content, all four major search engines agreed in February to support the “canonical” tag. Multiple ways to address the same page, including those resolved by rewrite rules or redirects can be winnowed to one “canonical” page, deemed to be the source and authoritative page.

And the fastest way for any site to be indexed, Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion program, will end in 2009.

New Partnerships: After chasing Yahoo! for a web eternity, Microsoft announced a search deal in July that would combine the #2 and #3 company’s search results. The deal is nowhere near final, but happened fast on the heels of Microsoft’s June launch of its rebranded Bing search engine in June. The new entity, quickly dubbed Microhoo, is expected to use Bing algorithms on Yahoo! properties.

New media darling Twitter cut its own deal with Microsoft and quickly announced a nearly identical deal with Google as both companies try to move into “real-time search”.

New Search Results: Google debuted six variants of search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2009, starting in January with a Timeline view that had previously only been seen in Google Labs. The largest search company followed with announcements in March of its “Vince” update that gives more weight to brands and branded terms. Google also previewed “Caffeine” in August – a jumble of traditional search results, news, video and even blog comments on the same page, but mixed together.

Google had already taken steps to assume searcher intent by starting to automatically display local results for service and product searches even if a geographical term wasn’t included in the search. Combined with the Vince/brand update, ranking nationally for generic words that brands traditionally use became extremely difficult using traditional methods.

Bing quickly countered with visual search in September, and as Google shortened its hotlist of trends to 40 terms, other companies including Twitter, Wikipedia and Bing quickly filled the void and reported on what terms were seeing the most search activity.

Title tags are important. But as an online marketer, you must stay abreast of monthly, sometimes weekly, changes in on-page SEO to enjoy continued success.

Guest Blog by Silver Beacon Marketing

Google Voice for Safari Hack Updated

Update: See also this Python script (with instructions for use) submitted by a reader in the comments that will take all of your Address Book contacts and convert them to bookmarklet links in an html file. You can import those links to your Safari bookmarks and then sync with the iPhone. I have not yet tested this. I had to make one small fix (it swapped the phone numbers around), but it works!

via ironicsans.com

This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Divisible Electrons. Democritus Would Not Be Pleased.

In a one-dimensional (1D) system of interacting electrons, excitations of spin and charge travel at different speeds, according to the theory of a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) at low energies. However, the clear observation of this spin-charge separation is an ongoing challenge experimentally. We have fabricated an electrostatically gated 1D system in which we observe spin-charge separation and also the predicted power-law suppression of tunneling into the 1D system. The spin-charge separation persists even beyond the low-energy regime where the TLL approximation should hold. TLL effects should therefore also be important in similar, but shorter, electrostatically gated wires, where interaction effects are being studied extensively worldwide.

via sciencemag.org

Fascinating.

Basically, this study cooled down a string of electrons (tunneling) to near absolute zero (0 K or very very cold), packed the electrons extremely close together and observed the results.

What happened?

The electrons broke down into two (new) particles, holons and spinons.

So what?

When our children are adults, they’ll be working with quantum computers and looking back on this type of research like we look back on the computer science of the 50’s. Plus, this is incredible science.

AffiliateHack: My New Marketing Blog

AffiliateHack is a blog about affiliate marketing written by Sam Harrelson. Sam is a longtime veteran of the affiliate marketing industry and previous winner of the Best Blogger award at Affiliate Summit and publisher of ReveNews and CostPerNews. Now Sam brings his unique perspective on affiliate marketing back to blogging form with AffiliateHack.

via affiliatehack.com

I miss blogging about the fascinating world of affiliate marketing. Now that I’m no longer an active affiliate marketer, I thought it would be a good time to dust off my blogging skills and give it another go.

There will be some overlap of what I do here and there, but this is a much more personal space (hence the silly .me address) and AffiliateHack is a much more public space.

We’ll see how it goes.

Great Use of Backpack with Pages for Each Day.

work: wed

“I have a page set up for each day of the workweek, and I evenly distribute the action tasks for all of my marketing tactics throughout the week.

On a given day, I simply click on that day’s page and get to work on the tasks, which are within a handy checklist (see image above along the left).

Each Monday, I un-check all the lists on every page, which helps me to stay accountable to my plans and goals for my business. I can clearly see what got done and what did not get done over the previous week. After un-checking the items, I’m ready to begin another week.”

via productblog.37signals.com

I love this implementation of workflow in Backpack.

Personally, I’m using Backpack in the GTD style (main INBOX for dumping everything then sub-folders pertaining to specific contexts or actions that need to be taken).

However, it would be very cool to do a blend of my GTD style with the daily pages style and incorporate individual classes (since I’ll be teaching 4-5 individual classes).

Clearly, I love todo lists more than actually acting upon them 🙂

Why Hasn’t Someone Made a FriendFeed Client for GMail like TwitterGadget?

I love TwitterGadget as a fully functioning Twitter client within GMail. Back in the "good old" days of Twitter, we had IM integration so these sorts of tools weren't needed if GMail was a major part of your workflow.  However, Twitter took that functionality (and Track) away from users in May '08, so we've been scrambling around to find the most efficient apps ever since.

While I think Seesmic Web has a great deal of potential, I'm still a fan of TwitterGadget plus TwitterSpy (which allows for semi-Track functionality based on the API… which is much slower than the original Track implementation).  So, I've got a contstant flow of tracked items (my alma mater, favorite sports, business terms, ideas I'm interested in pursuing, my name, etc) on my GMail IM. 

I've also got FriendFeed set up to deliver the same type of information flow through its fabulous IM integration (and email alerts as you can see in the label above).

But why hasn't someone developed a GMail gadget for FriendFeed along the same lines as TwitterGadget??

That would be killer and allow me to direct my Twitter, blogging (through Posterous), Facebook and FriendFeed accounts mostly through GMail.

Seriously, if you're a big GMail and Twitter user, give TwitterGadget (and TwitterSpy) a try.  And if you're a developer, get on the ball and deliver my FriendFeedGadget for GMail.  Thanks.

Great Review of @Posterous

Years of building and maintaining my WordPress blog have resulted in my learning a lot about WordPress and getting a lot of grease under my fingernails. Weeks of using Posterous has resulted in a media-rich blog with several posts per week. Tell me which service is more powerful.

via suntimes.com

I started using Posterous primarily as a photo-blog back in September of ’08.

However, it’s transitioned into my full time personal blog as I’ve changed up the samharrelson.com domain into a static landing (pointer) page.

Posterous solves so many problems for me.

Thanks to Andy Ihnatko for the great review affirming my love and thanks to the Posterous team for a fantastic product that has renewed my love of posting.

GMail vs Backpack

Now that I’ve decided on Backpack over Evernote as my hub of workflow (see post below), I’m in love with the Journal feature. As a teacher, it’s going to be a fantastic “private Twitter” that will allow me to record, sort and even subscribe (via the RSS feed and Google Reader) to my insights and daily documentations.

 I’m just thinking out loud here, but since I need to record most things on my mobile device (iPhone), would it be more efficient to use the Satchel app and iBasecamp mobile Safari hack orjust use GMail with pre-set labels acting as Basecamp pages and the Journal feature?

 Hmmm… Will have to do some testing…

 Sent from my iPhone

Joining Spartanburg Day School

Sam Harrelson joins the Middle School staff to teach 8th grade physical science, robotics and design technology. He returns to Spartanburg, where he and his wife, Anna, graduated from Wofford, following a circuitous route that began with earning a Master’s degree from Yale University, continued with successful forays into the world of business technology and online marketing, and included teaching 8th grade physical science at Hammond School. After two years in Asheville, he returns to his first love – teaching middle school science.

via spartanburgdayschool.org

This made my day (week, month, year)!

Thanks to whoever wrote it and thanks for using the term “circuitous roue” to describe my career. So true.