Month: January 2012

Affiliate Site Twitter Profile Pages

If you’re using Twitter in conjunction with your other social media marketing plans for your affiliate site, don’t forget the important aspect of the design of your Twitter Profile page.

TheNextWeb has a nice practical guide for points to consider when doing so (it’s aimed at brand marketing folks, but still applicable for performance marketers)…

Tips for Twitter Brand Pages: “The header image can be used to direct the user’s attention to a specific item on the page, as was the case in HP’s example, or it can be used to promote an engaging marketing plan, as Staples did, with a competition. Using the header image as nothing more than a banner advert, as both McDonald’s and Coca-Cola did, wound up getting the least attention from viewers.”

Word of caution here
 unlike Facebook Fan Pages or even Google+ pages, Twitter Profile pages area mixed bag. Yes, they are somewhat customizable and the new embedded media feature helps the look/feel. However, up to 1/2 (depending on whose numbers you trust) of Twitter users access the service via mobile or apps. I’d venture to posit (strongly) that most “power” users that are desirable for many niches are these types of app users (I rarey go to the main Twitter page and most of my network is similar).

So, design and test but don’t fret if you don’t see the type of interaction you do with a Facebook Fan page etc. Twitter, unlike Facebook, has lots of meaning in the message.

What is the Job of Social Logins on Your Site?

I wish Craig would have included his sources for which research he cites here…

Should You Use Social Login’s?: “Wondering  which social logins are the most popular option among users? Well, according to research, 42 percent of social logins use Facebook while the remaining alternatives are fairly equally distributed among Yahoo, Paypal, Google and others. If you can only select one form of social login
make it Facebook.”

Regardless, if you’re going to use social plugins for commenting, subscriptions, engagement, sharing etc on your site, I would hesitate to decide on just one to elevate unless you do your own careful research and heuristics on your actual site(s).

For instance, I have sites that receive the majority of their “social” traffic from Facebook and I have sites that receive virtually all of their social traffic from sites like Reddit and Twitter.

All traffic is not good traffic. Having passive visitors from Facebook that have nothing to do with performance marketing is grand, but doesn’t do much for the bandwidth costs of this site. Similarly, passive Twitter or search traffic that arrives at one of my niche book sites doesn’t do much for me (beyond pageview ego petting) compared to the Facebook or Amazon search traffic that supports and livens those sites.

So, as always, remember that your site is doing a job for people. Figure out what that job is for people and offer them the service that you would want if you were hiring your site to do a job for your mother. Limit their choices, walk them through the process, do friendly follow up and make them want to refer you and come back (as Jangro reminds us, make them yours).

Check your stats and see where the bulk of that traffic might be coming from and why and then decide if you want to elevate a social login (which you definitely should) service on your site.

Are Affiliate eBooks Easy?

Realistic look at eBook creation and publication with lots of detail from a particular detail (don’t agree with him about Amazon though):

E-books Are Not That Easy: “E-book publishing is not as easy as writing a MS Word document and pushing a button, no matter what the bloggers say. Even if you spend a couple of thousand dollars (I know somebody, not me, who spent over $4K on his e-book) it doesn’t guarantee much of anything.”

I’m on the fence here. I’ve not written an eBook (have gone through the laborious process of writing a treeware book for a large publisher though) but I’ve always been tempted. Maybe 2012 is the time for that to finally happen.

I look at what folks like Jim Kukral or Shawn Collins have done and wonder if the publishing process is as hard as the author above makes it sound or if there is some basic tools that simplify things.

Interesting debate.

Regardless, I expect 2012 will be the year when eBooks find complete mainstream adoption and when eBooks transition from a layman’s practice into something more polished and “professional” much like what happened to blogging in the last decade. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing at all.

How to Be Successful in Affiliate Marketing (and Life)

You should read this…

Inri137 comments on I’m not as smart as I thought I was.: “I need to ask you, has anyone ever taken the time to teach you how to study? And separately, have you learned how to study on your own in the absence of a teacher or curriculum? These are the most valuable tools you can acquire because they are the tools you will use to develop more powerful and more insightful tools. It only snowballs from there…”

No, seriously, go read the entire thing on Reddit. I’ll wait.

The entire thread is worthy of a looking over when you’re down on yourself or think this affiliate marketing thing is “over your head” or you are “too old to learn new tricks” or “too young to get in a rut.” So save it in your Evernote account as a PDF so you can find it later or pull it up on your iPhone or iPad when you’re on the road and need to be reminded of why you do what you do.

Work hard, practice, study and repeat. Don’t stop.

Affiliate marketing, and life in general, are things we do. These are jobs that we accomplish. Real ΔᜐΎαÎčÎŒÎżÎœÎŻÎ± comes when we work at the job of life.

So put your head down, stop procrastinating and get to work.

[I wrote this post for me, not you. But thanks for reading. Sam]

Back to Podcasting

I’m so excited to be back into podcasting on my own turf. This episode mentions a number of affiliate marketing related topics, so I don’t mind posting here as well:

ThinkingDaily: I Am a Breathing Time Machine: Thinking.FM

Exciting (for me at least)!

Here’s the mp3 or click above to listen to the stream (and/or subscribe in iTunes).

Now go and make your own affiliate podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download () | Embed

https://samharrelson.com/thinking Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Should Your Affiliate Blog Have Comments?

It seems like a no-brainer that blogs should have comments. Blogs, by their nature, are spaces of dialogue and personal viewpoints. However, Daring Fireball and platforms like Tumblr have paved the way for an acceptance of blogs sans-comments.

During my first attempt to reboot CostPerNews with the ill-fated adverbs.FM, I had a “no commenting” policy because I was so burned from the long epistles that would erupt on CPN from time-to-time (there’s nothing like friends asking you to look up an I.P. address of a commenter because they were upset someone would post something so hurtful under an anonymous guise). That blog failed due in no small part to its absences of comments.

However, the issue of whether to include comments on a blog (especially niche blogs like we have in the affiliate industry) reared its hydra head again this week.

Affiliate folks like Scott Jangro (who chastised me for not having comments on adverbs.FM) have been weighing in with salient thoughts…

Turning Blog Comments Off – a Short Case Study by @mattgemmell: “There are many times that I’ve also questioned the value and benefits of blog comments.  They tend to be a flash in the pan, and depending on the platform the blog is hosted on, it can be difficult to keep tabs on posts that you’ve commented on in various places.

But there are also some blogs that are a pleasure to read, due in no small part to the comments.”

I chose to go with Disqus here on PPT mostly because I’ve seen how well the platform works on my affiliate blogs that are so super niche that they typically don’t see the type of trolling that gets under the skin of most bloggers. Plus, Disqus is super easy to regulate, which is another reason I love/trust it with my precious commenting content.

However, Matthew Ingram has a great post on GigaOM this afternoon on the debate and he adequately sums up why your affiliate blog (whatever niche you happen to be covering) should have comments


Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort — Tech News and Analysis: “A blog without comments is a soap-box, plain and simple. Not having comments says you are only interested in passing on your wisdom, without testing it against any external source (at least not where others can watch you do so) or leaving open the opportunity to actually learn something from those who don’t have their own blogs, or aren’t on Twitter or Google+. That may make for a nicer experience for you the blogger, and it may make your blog load faster, but it is still a loss — for you, and for your readers.”

Commenting on blogs opens the writer up to the type of frustrations and frictions that many affiliates would rather avoid if they are spending the bulk of their time on making their sites super optimized with loads of keywords and content that is sure to have them “rank” high artificially.

Yet, if you’re interested in long term organic growth, commenting allows for affiliates to present their sites/blogs as an opportunity to perform a job for its visitors.

Yes, commenting can cause friction, but friction should be a part of your affiliate strategy. This is the real growth potential for affiliate sites as people normally find your content because they want to do something. Limit their choices by providing a full service of doing the job they are searching to have fulfilled, but give people the option to provide a level of feedback that ensures for authentic engagement.

Piezo for Podcasting

I frequently use and love Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro app for recording audio from Skype or my Mac to use on my podcasts.

However, Rogue Amoeba has a great new “lightweight” app for folks that don’t need the full power (or cost) of Audio Hijack Pro called Piezo ($10)…

Mac App Store – Piezo: “Piezo now offers full support for recording from VoIP apps like Skype, iChat, and FaceTime. Local audio is recorded to the left channel, while the remote caller is recorded to the right.”

Looks pretty straightforward and sweet to me.

I’ll be giving this a whirl tonight. If you have a Mac and do (or are interested in) podcasting (as you should be), go pick up Piezo.

More on Like-Jacking and Quality Traffic

Last week I posted about the rise of “Like-Jacking” on Facebook and why digital literacy is so important. The WSJ covers the issue this morning as well…

Spam Finds a New Target – WSJ.com: “A common social-spam attack on Facebook, known as “like-jacking,” involves duping users into clicking on an image that looks as if a friend has clicked the “Like” button, recommending it.”

When I first got my start in the online marketing world, I worked at an email marketing firm that helped spark the “Free iPod” phenomenon in exchange for just an email address and zip code. It was amazingly profitable and I soon learned why. People want freebies.

However, the quality of traffic was terrible and the lists were sold and resold so many times that any value they might have had were soon distilled into the ether.

The same holds true for Facebook Likes and retweets today and the growing realization that all traffic is not good traffic (especially traffic derived from passive social traffic that is unqualified and not valuable).

Some Things Never Change

It’s fascinating to me that mobile ad networks are making the same mistakes that we made with web-based performance advertisements 10 years ago


Airpush – Developers: “Developers are paid on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions) rather than CPC. An “impression” in the case of Push Notification Ads includes any time an ad is pushed to a device, whether or not the user actually views the ad or not. The actual CPM rate which you are paid for a given app is driven by the CTR, CPC, and Quality for the given app.”

A mobile ad network based on real CPA or even EPC makes much more sense given what we know and the experience we’ve had over the past decade (going on two for some people).

What job do the ads do? Why would people click on them within an app? Those are the issues that these types of networks don’t address to their detriment.

Mobile is relatively young as a performance advertising and marketing space, but no reason to re-invent the wheel.

The Kids Are All Coding; Why Aren’t You?

I’m working with a group of 6th-8th grade girls in our Middle School who easily blew past the first five or so lessons on CodeAcademy today.

I was impressed how quickly and easily they groked ideas like substrings and declaring variables. Turns out they aren’t the only ones interested in coding…

Codecademy’s CodeYear Attracts 100,000 Aspiring Programmers In 48 Hours | TechCrunch: “Two days ago, Codecademy — a startup that’s looking to bring programming to the masses — launched a nifty initiative called Code Year. It’s pretty straightforward: sign up, and each week you’ll receive some programming lessons in your email inbox.

And apparently, there are a lot of people who want to learn how to code. Code Year just had its 100,000th user sign up — a remarkable milestone given that the site has only been up for 48 hours. And that number continues to grow at a rapid pace.”

We’re using CodeAcademy as the first steps of a trimester long endeavor to make an official iOS and HTML5 app for our school.

I didn’t come up with this idea
 they did.

Pretty soon, these girls and their peers who are toting around iPads, iPod Touches, Kindle Fires, iPhones and Android Devices like we toted around Walkmans are going to start demanding more from their web experiences just as we of the Walkman generation demanded more from our music experiences (and we see what happened to the music industry in the course of a decade).

If you’re going to have a viable web business in 10 or 20 years, it’s time to learn how to code beyond some basic PHP or WordPress hooks.

The kids are alright.