Thunderbird’s Affiliate Program


www.spreadthunderbird.com

Mozilla is best known for Firefox, but for fans of open source, sanity and alternatives to Outlook (or Evolution on Ubuntu), Thunderbird is a popular choice.

And now Thunderbird has an affiliate program to spread the good word (although you get points and pride, not cash… so it’s more for the fanboi’s than the serious affiliate business person).

Affiliates Home | Mozilla Thunderbird – Reclaim Your Inbox | Mozilla Thunderbird – Reclaim Your Inbox: “SpreadThunderbird offers a simple affiliates program (Beta) that enables members to support Thunderbird and earn fame and prizes.

SpreadThunderbird’s Affiliate Program is not the only program to help drive Thunderbird downloads.

We’re also interested in seeing more of these kinds of affiliate programs and if you’re interested in starting a similar program, please contact us”

I’m glad to see something like this, even if it is geared towards the diehards and fans.

I’ve been an off and on user of Thunderbird over the past few years and it is a viable competitor to Apple Mail or Outlook. While it doesn’t have native support on these platforms, the features often outweigh those costs.

Amazon Updates Deals Widgets

Amazon continues to make interesting and noteworthy improvements to its associates program. I wrote off the ability make any money with Amazon a few years back because of my own lack of success with their offerings on my affiliate sites.

However, I’ve been using Amazon more and more with great results on click-thru’s. They have so many options for affiliates and publishers (esp in niche categories that aren’t serviced well by traditional affiliate networks (which is a funny term to use since Amazon had an early affiliates program…but I digress).

If you haven’t given Amazon a shot in a while, you might want to reconsider.

Here’s an email sent out to associates/publishers this morning with details on new Deals widgets:

Dear Amazon Associate:

As you’re gearing up for the holiday season, don’t miss out on the new and improved Deals Widget. Now you can display the hottest deals from Amazon on your web page. The Deals Widget lets your users browse discounted items and ongoing promotions from the Amazon.com product category of your choice.

The new widget lets you display the deals most relevant to your website to improve customer retention and conversion.

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Deals by Category
You can now configure the widget to display discounted items and promotions from any Amazon.com category of your choice! Simply use the drop down to select a specific category and we’ll keep the widget updated with the latest deals from that category. Remember that your viewers are more likely to click through a widget when the deals are relevant to the theme and topic of your site. You can now use the ‘Deals by Category’ feature to place relevant Amazon deals throughout your site.

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Gold Box Deals
You can continue to display Gold Box deals using the Deals Widget. Gold Box deals are limited quantity offers that run for a specified time. The Gold Box deals widget lets your viewers browse through the latest Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and Our Best Deals.

Multiple Sizes
The Deals Widget is available in a variety of standard sizes and can be placed anywhere on your site. Available sizes include: Sidebar (120×400, 160×400), Large (250×250, 300×250, 336×280) and Banner (468×60, 728×90).

Create a Deals Widget in just a few clicks. If you want to display a list of handpicked products, be sure to try out the My Favorites, Carousel, and Slideshow widgets.

If you have any questions or feedback on this feature or the Associates Program, please contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

Yahoo Gets Into the Performance Marketing Space

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Yahoo announces their Yahoo Deals platform:

Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Have I got a deal for you: “Retail isn’t all doom and gloom. While total spending may drop this season as consumers guard their net worth, Forrester Research predicts that online shopping will actually rise 12% over last year, mainly because half of online shoppers anticipate that the best values and deals will be found on the Web. And it goes without saying that they’ll also avoid the stress of crowded malls and long lines when they log on in their pajamas.”

Similar to Microsoft Cashback, the aim is to help consumers find the best deals for popular products.

Should be interesting to see how well they do with this…

The Valley Still Doesn’t Get Performance Marketing

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Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media (which is the umbrella for such wide-read and influential blogs as Lifehacker, i09 (one of my favs), Gawker, Valleywag, Fleshbot, etc) writes about the coming online advertising apocalypse…

Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan: “Internet advertising is by no means immune. Advocates of the internet claim that the sector is both more mature than it was during the last downturn; and it’s more ‘measurable’ than other media. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 27% decline in 2000-2002. Good luck with that. The sector’s maturity also means that its underlying growth is more sluggish than it was in the late 1990s. In 2001, internet advertising swung to a 13% decline from 78% growth the previous year; this time the sector starts from a growth rate of 27%; I would hate to see what a swing as violent as the dotcom burst would look like. As for the measurability of internet media: sure, marketers and their agencies can track engagement and clicks in great detail online; but it’s still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer’s sales.”

What Denton and Calacanis, etc fail to come to grips with is that the model of ad welfare which has supported the Silicon Valley lifestyle and worldview over the last 5 years of web2.0 is not (and has never been) the reality of actionable advertising or marketing.

Despite Calacanis’ dire predictions of affiliate marketing’s irrelevancy at Affiliate Summit West ’08, there is a brighter future for the industry compared to what the Valley will have to endure in the coming years.

Welcome to reality. Have a seat. Enjoy the view.

You Got Your Basecamp in My GMail

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I talk about Basecamp a good deal here.

And there’s a good reason for that… it’s essential for web workers (which means all online marketers and/or entrepreneurs) as an end-all-be-all of productivity, project planning, organization, todo lists, whiteboards, etc.

Now, you can add your Basecamp projects to GMail via Periscope via Labs. I’ve tried it… it’s tremendous:

Gmail Gadgets: Add Your Basecamp Projects to Gmail: “To enable this gadget, you’ve got to have a Basecamp account with the API enabled, a Periscope account (which stores your Basecamp login information), and Gmail Labs’ Gadgets by external URL feature enabled. Got all that? Once you’re there, head to the Gadgets tab in Gmail and copy and paste the Periscope Basecamp Gadget URL in, and then your sidebar will display your Basecamp projects as pictured.”

Yes, my GMail tab looks like a crazy narcissist took over the place since I have my Calendar, Docs and Remember The Milk Gadgets going along with the occasional chat (I use GTalk within GMail for AIM and Google chat)…not to mention the steady deluge of email.

Nevertheless, I feel as if I’m getting somethings done with this approach.

Jim Kukral Rebrands as TheBizWebCoach

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Jim Kukral, a veteran of the performance marketing world, MC of Affiliate Summit and serial entrepreneur, has rebranded himself as TheBizWebCoach and is writing a book called Blend This Book! about attention economics.

Hi, I’m Jim Kukral, The Biz Web Coach! I’m doing something different here. It’s revolutionary! I’m offering my 12+ years of experience and expertise in a new way, through Web coaching on a membership program.

Why?

Jim sees this as the future of business web coaching and understandably realizes that coaching is becoming a major niche for individuals with enough social capital and know-how to help businesses (and/or individuals looking to start them) in these troubled economic times.

It’s hard to explain the totality of what Jim is doing, but it is quite interesting. Beyond being a “business coach,” Jim rightly sees that experts are moving into the one-on-one type help situation (instead of ebooks, etc).

So, is membership the next big thing? I think it may be.

Hopefully, I’ll be doing a podcast with Jim in the next few days where we talk about his ideas and goals for the rebrand and where he sees this space going.

As a part-time consultant, I’m interested in hearing his thoughts and you should be too.

Zoho and the Cloud Stability Question

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I’ve been a long time proponent of “cloud computing” and can’t imagine trading in my GMail or Google Docs on any machine I’m using for Outlook or Office tied to one machine or one OS.

Whether I’m on my Blackberry, Ubuntu laptop, Macbook Pro, Nokia N800, iPod Touch, Mac Mini, my wife’s Vista laptop, etc I can get to every piece of email, every document, every note (through Evernote) every task (through Remember The Milk) that I need.

It is beyond liberating and the type of freedom that any heavy user of computers should seek out. I simply cannot wrap my mind around people that continue to tie themselves to one desktop or laptop or even one operating system.

Firefox is my operating system.

However, the biggest concern I hear (and I have) about using “web apps” like GMail is whether or not they are stable and secure. What happens when their server goes down? What if you can’t get to your GMail because Google is doing maintenance? It’s a very good question and something I consider a cost for having the freedom of mobility.

This morning, Zoho is launching “Zoho Status” which monitors the health and stability of all the Zoho web apps (and they are numerous)…

Zoho-Status: “Today, we are adding a new section to our website – Zoho Status – which displays the health of all Zoho Applications. You can visit http://status.zoho.com to see if our applications are running and responding fine. The site provides you availability & response times for the past week along with downtime, if any. “

I find this highly important and relevant to web workers like affiliate marketers because many of us do use GMail or Google Docs on a daily, if not hourly or minute-ly, basis.

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Zoho is, yet again, pushing ahead past Google or other web app providers here just as they have done frequently in the past. If you’ll remember, Zoho was the first to integrate Google Gears with its word processor to allow for offline work that syncs to the server when you are back on the network. Google Docs now offers this. Just recently, Zoho released Zoho Mail. I honestly think it’s a superior product to GMail because it takes the best of GMail and melds it with the functionality of Outlook, all in a web interface, complete with Google Gears for offline mode. GMail doesn’t have Gears integration yet. I’m not switching just yet, but it is tempting given Zoho Mail’s range of functionalities that GMail is just starting to catch up to with its own Lab features.

So, as a web worker, if I’m looking for a stable suite of web apps to use in place of Outlook and Office, I’m looking closer at Zoho today. Much of what I do on the web is mission critical in one way or another, and having the peace of mind that Zoho Status provides (at least in a placebo effect way) is calming.

Jangro on Datafeeds

Jangro is writing some great (and useful) stuff these days over on his blog…

Datafeeds Done Right, Finally. | Jangro.com: “It was one of those painstakingly slow processes for the affiliate that caused this one to not even bother in many cases.”

Head over to get his full review on how some networks are providing better datafeeds for affiliates and publishers.

MTV Music Portal is Nostalgia Central and Good for Affiliates

Sure, you can find most of that ancient medium known as the “music video” on YouTube, but having all those great videos from the 80’s, 90’s and early ’00’s in a neat searchable place is handy.

BTW, here’s a vid for “New York New York” from my favorite singer/songwriter Ryan Adams that was shot just a few days before 9/11. I was living just an hour or so away from the city in Connecticut at the time, so the video had a big impact on me (and still does):

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:14102

Anyways, if you are doing anything music related on the affiliate side, this might be a site worth investigating considering the embedding options…

MTV MUSIC – Ryan Adams – New York, New York

37signals New Affiliate Programs

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37signals is the company behind such popular web worker products as Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise and Campfire. You’ve probably noticed the BackPack banner over in the sidebar, but now they’ve expanded the affiliate program to include their other productivity products. I’m pretty excited about that.

If you’re a small business doing online markeitng and not using Basecamp, you’re really missing out. It’s the hub of my online business life and people like Scott Jangro are also big fans.

I want to reiterate how reliant I am on Basecamp and Backpack for organizing my personal and business (and academic) lives, and also how you should be promoting these products if you’re in the B2B affiliate field.

37signals Affiliate Program: “The 37signals Affiliate Program pays you once after a customer’s first monthly payment, plus 5% of that customer’s future monthly fees for as long as their account remains open. “

Of course, if you’d like to sign up for any of their programs, feel free to do so with the affiliate links in this post (b/c CPN always needs and appreciates your support!).