Category: Affiliates

Here’s a quick vid updating you on the status of the soon-to-be ReveNews move to WordPress:

If you’re doing video and using WordPress and YouTube, this is a really nifty plugin that alleviates some of the frustrations that people often have when they start embedding video into blog posts:

Smart Youtube – WordPress Plugins: “Smart Youtube is a WordPress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in both your post and in RSS feed. It is small, fast and does not depend on any external scripts.

The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Unlike other plugins the link to the video will also appear in your rss feed. And the best thing is, Smart Youtube will also display a preview screenshot of the video in your RSS feed.”

I see this all the time on merchant and affiliate sites… if you’re going to put copyright notices on your sites, make sure that are at least up-to-date (along with your T&C’s and Privacy Policies):

Gullible.info: “Among web pages that show a copyright date, 3.5% have a date that is more than one year out of date. As of February of 2008, 11.4% of pages with obviously new information still show ‘© 2007′”

[display_podcast]

Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson cover the latest and greatest in the world of performance marketing, tech and all things geek. This week we discuss revolutionary screensavers, how to butt kiss Jason Calacanis, the acquisition of buy.at by AOL and why tech bloggers don’t like affiliates, and why some affiliates don’t like each other.

The show runs about an hour.

I’ve been testing out ShowYourAdHere, and I have to say that I’m impressed. We’re even giving it a go with the ReveNews ad rotations.

So, if you need an easy-to-use ad serving solution that is web based, give ShowYourAdHere a shot.

Show Your Ad Here

Listening to the most recent Gillmor Gang today brought about more head-scratching for me as to why or what is so hard to understand about the basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is and what affiliate marketing is not.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand that it will (probably) not help my bottom line or profit margin by any degree if the participants of the Gillmor Gang and the associated San Francisco Bay-centric clique understand what affiliate marketers do and that they are not SEO’ers, spammers, arbitragers, MLM’ers or general web-pollutionists.

I’m referring to Jason Calacanis doing a series of well (or ill depending on your sense of humor and sense of segue way cadence) placed ads for the Affiliate Summit during tapings of the Gillmor Gang podcast. I’ve covered the first episode of The Gang where Jason caused a few ripples by doing the Affiliate Summit ads over on ReveNews.

On this past Friday’s taping, it was TechCrunch‘s Mike Arrington who asked the now inevitable “Are they SEO’ers?” question when Jason did his now tongue-in-cheek ad followed with an odd “they must be all black-hatters.” Jason answered that affiliate marketing is a billion dollar industry that no one knows about and isn’t SEO or MLM. Good to hear that Jason has been doing his homework and I do look forward to hearing his thoughts on the industry since he is the Affiliate Summit keynote.

So, my question is whether or not I should keep feeling a sense of frustration or exasperation that such web influentials know so little about affiliate marketing or seemingly care so little to learn about affiliate marketing before slapping it with an unfair brand of spam/blackhat/arbitrage/junk.

You’d think (or at least I do) that bloggers who blog about technology and web2.0 monetization such as Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick would also investigate the business model of DoubleClick’s important Performics division. Or perhaps these bloggers would seemingly be interested as to why the Japanese mega-corp Rakutan spent hundreds of millions on Linkshare or why ValueClick and its Commission Junction property are considered next in line for a major acquisition after DoubleClick, Razorfish and Right Media (if you listen to the rumors and sites such as SeekingAlpha). In all of these examples, affiliate marketing plays a major role.

Perhaps I’m just being protective and defensive over an industry that I’ve seen dramatically mature and “grow-up” over the last few years and one in which I’m proud to be a member. Nevertheless, in order to adequately understand the web landscape and the future shape of web apps, bloggers and thinkers must take into account the various forms of monetization that exist on the web without dismissing them as black-hat. Or at least that’s my hope.

A couple of months ago, I tested out Disqus for comments. I’m re-enabling that because I have been impressed with the features and forum-esque feel (plus, you can grab an RSS of the comment thread).

We’re probably going to hook this up on ReveNews as well as soon as the WordPress transition is done (should be within the next couple of weeks before the Affiliate Summit).

Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Using Disqus for Comments Here at Cost Per News

The AffiliateClassroom folks have put together a professional certification course for affiliate managers and released a video to help explain the course.

They are launching the course at AffiliateClassroomLIVE on the Saturday before the Affiliate Summit (Feb 23) in Las Vegas.

I generally view this as a very positive development for the industry. We’ve needed some sort of accrediting body in affiliate marketing for a long while and as the industry continue to grow up and evolve, this need will only increase.

Accertified.com: First Industry Recognized and Endorsed Affiliate Manager Certification

Wow, this is pretty surprising. I’m not an alarmist, but this is a pretty big miss for Google:

LIVE ANALYSIS: Google Misses Revs/EPS, Stock Plunges – Silicon Alley Insider: “Overall, net revenue decelerated sharply–from 62% growth in Q3 to 52% growth in Q4–after a series of quarters with only modest deceleration. Expect this deceleration to lead to multiple compression: Google’s days of trading at 50X cash flow are likely behind it.”

(Via Silicon Alley Insider .)

Zac Johnson was upset over a sudden change to Azoogle’s referral terms and blogged about it yesterday. Azoogle didn’t take long to respond. There’s a great deal for both publishers and networks to learn from all of this…

AzoogleAds Makes Good on New Referral Terms | Super Affiliate Secrets from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson: “Once again, this fiasco has shown the power of blogging and communication. While some readers were angry that I removed AzoogleAds from the blog, simply because you thought it would be a loss of revenue for me, you are wrong. My referrals and revenue sources from AzoogleAds are minimal and I made the decision to remove their links because at the time, new terms were put in place with no explanations or reasoning. With so many networks and revenue sources available, I will not tolerate drastic changes without reasoning, and neither should you.”

(Via Zac Johnson .)

Techmeme‘s Gave Rivera chimes in on Andy Beard’s post about Google’s apparent -3 PageRank penalty applied to Techmeme.

Great stuff… go read Andy’s post and Gabe’s full response:

Techmeme PageRank Penalty? | Andy Beard – Niche Marketing: “Hey Tim Berners-Lee, you once said ‘hyperlink by enclosing anchor text in an A HREF tag’. Hope you don’t mind, but Google’s amending that with ‘oh, and make sure to use a nofollow condom on links to entities with which you have commercial relationships, and if your links are redirects, robots.txt disallow the redirect urls…wait, better yet, nofollow those too’. Thanks for the simplicity Tim, but this is what progress looks like.”

(Via Andy Beard Niche Marketing .)

ContentRobot is a great company that is helping us move ReveNews from MovableType4 to WordPress. If you need help with WordPress installs or service, I highly recommend them.

Karen, Dana and the team recently asked Stephanie Agresta, Carsten Cumbrowski and myself how to get started in affiliate marketing.

Here’s our short responses:

Affiliate Blogging: Getting Started | ContentRobot

There’s a new version of MarsEdit out which allows you to save drafts on the server side.

What is MarsEdit and why should you care, you ask? Then you’re probably not blogging on a Mac. But, if you are go check out v 2.1:

MarsEdit 2 – Powerful Blog Publishing For Your Mac

I don’t know why, but “FAIL!” pictures are hilarious to me. I’m not a mean spirited person or of the Uncov persuasion. Yet, I can’t help but laugh.

See many more at The Fail Blog (the new LOLCats?)

I’m an avid Twitter user and fan (you can follow me here). I love when politicians use the service for updates and quick thoughts such as what Democrats John Edwards and Barak Obama have been doing in the presidential campaign as well as what Republican Rep John Boehner has been doing with Congressional business.

My favorite person to argue with, Shawn Collins, let me know that Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has brought the straight talk express to Twitter with his own account. I noticed what I think might be the first political attack tweet from a candidate:

Other candidates that have been using Twitter have been posting info about events for local followers or either links to YouTube video of rally’s, etc. It would be a shame if the candidates follow McCain lead and bring the negativity so associated with TV political messages into the Twitter medium.

Evidently, I’m a spammer…

This was sent to me by my pal and super uber affiliate marketer Scott Jangro today. Clearly, that’s my name, my MySpace profile pic and my “identity.”

Seriously, WTF? Clearly this did not come from “me” yet it did come from “me” according to MySpace. If you thought Facebook’s Beacon was bad, then this is terrible.

I’ve logged into my MySpace account (which I rarely do) and everything seems in order. Just to be on the safe side I changed my password.

How in the hell did this happen? Did all of my MySpace “friends” get this? Worse yet, it’s for a ringtone offer. Shoemoney would be proud. I digress.

Ah, the joys of social networks.

[Update] Evidently, I’m not alone. Although the “change your password and everything will be cool” advice really doesn’t make me feel better.

For the past three years, I’ve bookmarked a great deal of things using del.icio.us. Last Spring, I decided to start using Ma.gnolia.com to bookmark marketing and tech related items that might be interesting for readers here and using Feedburner’s “Link Splicer” option to import those bookmarks into the RSS feed and daily email subscription newsletters.

I wasn’t sure if people would enjoy the bookmarks or find benefit but soon realized they did. With the craziness of having a newborn, I feel behind on linking through Ma.gnolia and decided to start again recently. After turning on the Link Splicer again this week, I’ve notice RSS numbers and actives jump up 12% and the most popular feed items are consistently the bookmarks.

I’m not sure if that’s saying more about people’s opinion of my blogging or the benefit that they are finding in the things I bookmark, but I’ll take the increase either way 🙂

So, if you are using del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia (or Furl or Digg) for bookmarks and Feedburner for feed management, make sure to turn on Link Splicer. People do want to see what you think is interesting from your daily web browsing.

Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson discuss the week's news in affiliate marketing and online tech news.

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=Pa1fdef232c02f041ef8ffbaa9d13d84aYl9wRVREYmdw&buffer=5&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap28

MP3 File

Show Notes
– Affiliate Summit Tips
– Scoble Sells Out
– Ethical Standards and Blogging
– 45n5 and Affiliate Spam
– WickedFire N00bery
– John Chow
– Izea, PayPerPost and Ethics
– 5 Seconds of Suck
– Shawn is Yoko Ono
– Why is Jason Calacanis Affiliate Summit Keynote?!?
– Auto Approval Sucks… or Does It?
– Affiliate Certification?

Visit GeekCast.fm for More Great Geek Marketing Podcasts!

One of my favorite events (or at least the one with the best food) at the Affiliate Summit is the Christian Affiliate Marketing Assoc’s Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues.

This is the second year the CAMA is putting on the event, and it should be even better this year since transportation is being provided from the Rio (where the Affiliate Summit is being held) down to the House of Blues. Last year, I walked from where Wayne Porter and I were camping all the way to the H.O.B. and I have to say that I got my exercise on that chilly morning. Good times.

The 2nd Annual Gospel Brunch, presented by the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association, is taking place at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay on Sunday, February 24, 2008 from 8:45 AM to 11:30 AM. Yes, it’s early and most of you will have been partying late into the night on Saturday night, but you could probably use some good food and fellowship to cure that hangover and wash away some of the Sin City taint. In all seriousness, it’s a great event and I highly recommend. As the CAMA points out, you don’t have to be a Christian or from any denomination to attend (and no one is going to beat you over the head with the book of Deuteronomy to make you change your sinnin’ ways…).

So, if you need a moment of respite, rest and fellowship during a hectic Affiliate Summit week, make sure to attend the Gospel Brunch.