Category: Affiliates

Missy Ward and Shawn Collins of the Affiliate Summit Conference are heading up a “pre-show” on WebMasterRadio tomorrow at 1pm. I’ll be taking part as a participant along with Jim Kukral, Wil Reynolds and Stephanie Agresta:

The Affiliate Summit Pre Show will feature the following guests:

Stephanie Agresta – Founder of Stephanie Agresta Consulting, which helps online entrepreneurs and emerging technology companies realize effective, cost-efficient online marketing programs

Sam Harrelson – VP of Biz Dev for OnCard Marketing and one of performance marketing’s best-known voices, designer of affiliate programs for top retailers, operator of marketing networks and manager of a variety of consumer advertising channels

Jim Kukral of JimKukral.com and active, multiple-roled participant in the affiliate marketing industry and leading expert in the blogosphere, recently awarded the Affiliate Summit “Best Blogger” award for his voice and participation, also former publisher of ReveNews.com

Wil Reynolds – Founder of SEER Interactive, dedicated to driving traffic to sites from search engines and analyzing the impact that traffic has on the bottom line of companies

More on Affiliate Summit at http://www.affiliatesummit.com.

Make sure to listen in as this should be a very good show. I’ll try to get a copy to post here and we’ll hopefully have one up on GeekCast.fm for you to tune into as well.

Tony Hung has a tremendous reminder / tip / must-do if you’re running a blog on WordPress:

If you’re running WordPress, unless you’ve already locked down your Wp-content folder with some .htaccess fixes, you may not notice that your Wp-content/plugins folder is naked and bare to the world. That is, navigate to http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-content/plugins and you may find a directory listing of your plugins folder, files and all. How do you fix it? Easy. Just upload an empty index.html into the wp-content/plugins folder and its all fixed.

(Via Deep Jive Interests.)

I’ve teamed up with Jim Kukral and Shawn Collins to form GeekCast.fm which will be a podcast and video show aggregator for our projects as well as select others.

I’ve been doing the daily 22 minute AffiliateFortuneCookies podcast which you can find there as well as Shawn and Lisa Picarille’s AffiliateThing and Jim Kukral’s Daily Flip vidcast and VideoNinjas podcast with Magnify.net’s Steve Rosenbaum.

We’re also doing a weekly flagship show called GeekCast Gang where we’ll be discussing various issues in online marketing, video, mobile, affiliate, search, etc. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Should be a fun venture! The first episode of GeekCast Gang is below. You can grab the feed and subscribe in iTunes or your podcast player of choice here.

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=P15a926455cc49bb2d23bf20cb2f30520Yl9wRVREYmB9&buffer=5&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap28
MP3 File

According to Mark Meckler at the Digital Moses Confidential, TheUseful has settled with the Florida Attorney General’s office for a cool million:

In a press release eerily similar to that issued by Azoogle upon its settlement and million dollar payment to the Florida Attorney General, The Useful / World Avenue USA has announced that the Florida Office of Attorney General has closed its investigation into the company’s activities and will be dismissing its lawsuit.

Watch the way you use the term “free” in Florida, folks.

If you are in the world of online marketing / content monetization / affiliate marketing, you’ve no doubt seen the dozens of posts covering the launch of pepperjamNETWORK.  It’s a major event for the online marketing world and the amount of coverage generated in the first 12 hours since launch has been impressive.

Randomly, I decided to check Techmeme to see if any of the pepperjamNETWORK coverage made it there.  Even though blogs with high PR ratings and thousands of readers and subscribers that have been on Techmeme numerous times (this blog, ReveNews, Shawn Collins’ AffiliateTip, VinnyLingham.com, etc) covered the release, none of them made it onto Techmeme.

Not to mention that it’s the day of Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld, so many people in the tech space will be looking for a few glimpses of non-Apple news.

I’m not complaining about the echo chamber yada yada, but it is interesting to note that if and when TechCrunch or ReadWrite/Web covers the launch of pepperjamNETWORK, it will be on Techmeme immediately.

There really is no place for the geek marketer.

I guess it all goes back to the misconceptions of affiliate marketing that people outside our industry have.

The Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards have been announced on the Affiliate Summit Blog.

I’m honored to be among such esteemed people in this year’s Pinnacle Awards. Carsten and Shoemoney are two of my favorite affiliate bloggers and I am completely flabbergasted to be considered in their ranks.

Best Blogger

Carsten Cumbrowski
Sam Harrelson
Jeremy Schoemaker

The awards will be given at this year’s Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas in February. If you’re involved in affiliate marketing, you need to be there.

Affiliate Summit Blog

Ben Edelman has a new report and investigation of in install of “Sears Holdings Company” complete with his expected thoroughness and attention to detail:

Late last month, Benjamin Googins (a senior researcher in the Anti-Spyware unit at Computer Associates) critiqued a ComScore installation performed by Sears’ “Sears Holdings Community” (“My SHC Community” or “SHC”). After reviewing the installation sequence, Ben concluded that the installation offered “very little mention of software or tracking” and otherwise fell short of CA and industry standards. I agree.

I write today to add my own critique. I begin by presenting the entire installation sequence in screenshots and video. I then explain why the limited notice provided falls far short of the standards the FTC has established. Finally, I show that Sears’ claims of adequate notice are demonstrably false.

Squidoo strikes back against Google with an interesting front end for a Squidoo lens creator called SquidKnol:

We built a new front door that makes it easy for you to build a scholarly page, filled with details, facts and more on Squidoo. And of course it will be indexed all over the web…

Pretty smart (and funny at the same time) from Seth Godin and the Squidoo team if you ask me.  Should be fun to watch how much attention this brings back to Squidoo since the topic of Knols is hot conversation in the online tech and marketing world at the moment.

Seth’s Blog: For scholars who just can’t wait

My pal Marshall Kirkpatrick made a post on Read/WriteWeb concerning the fascinating new TweeterBoard site:

On Tweeterboard you’ll find not only a list of the top 100 most influential users on Twitter – you can also look up any of almost 2000 users and see who they are conversing with and get some idea how much influence they carry in the Twitter ecosystem. Only a small portion of Twitter users are being tracked so far – but if indexing can be automated (!) then this could become a very important service.

Tweetboard is fascinating but it’s inherently bad for the type of organic and fluid conversation that happens on Twitter everyday.

If Twitter is going to make it to the mainstream and really start pushing the envelope of personal content production by non-tech gods and goddesses, we’ve got to get over the silly notion of “rank” and “importance” that these types of things measure.

Why?

Because sites like Technorati and Techmeme (though utilitarian for some) have stunted (or at least perverted) the blogosphere by introducing concepts of ranking and opened the floodgates to spammer-and-gamer SEO’s and affiliates (those are adjectives for some, not for all) and created a class system of blogging that is not easily overcomed.

Let’s level the playing field with Twitter and not repeat the same mistakes that caused for the creation of A Lists, B Lists and Z Lists. Otherwise, Twitter and micro-blogging in general will suffer.

[Update] After I posted this, fellow Twitter user Mike Krigsman (someone I follow) and ZD Net blogger posted this:

@samharrelson Absolutely agree core value of Twitter is leveling the field. Diminishment of that attribute will limit it’s value. Think Digg

Exactly.

Interesting post (and discussion in the comments) from ComparisonEngine on Pepperjam’s shogging.com site:

In a search for Ugg boots, I found the following ad:

I thought I was clicking on a Shopping.com ad. Instead, I arrived at Shogging.com, which is owned by the Pepperjam Network.

Kris Jones has also posted about Brian’s ComparisonEngine post on the PepperJam blog . Should be fun to see how the comments and conversation play out and what people think of the PPC marketing strategy behind this (and to see how many affiliates or agencies are doing similar things).

While seemingly mundane, this is killer for those of us with an already large part of our digital life wrapped up in the Google cloud.  Sure there are sites that already do this, but Google has earned my trust for essential info like a flight status:

For the latest information on a flight’s status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times.

Better Flight Stats Results from Google

Peter Kim has a thought provoking post on a quote from Lester Wunderman:

“We are living in an age of repersonalization and individualization.  People, products and services are all seeking an individual identity.  Taste, desire, ambition and lifestyle have made shopping once again a form of personal expression.  A computer can know and remember as much marketing detail about 200,000,000 consumers as did the owner of a crossroads general store about his handful of customers.  It can know an select such personal details as who prefers strong coffee, imported beer, new fashions, bright colors.  Who just bought a home, freezer, camera, automobile.  Who had a new baby, is overweight, got married, owns a pet, likes romantic novels, serious reading, listens to Bach or the Beatles.  New marketing forms which will link these facts to advertising and selling must evolve – where advertising and buying become a single action.”

Spot on.

Crazy thing is that the quote is from November … of 1967.  That is real thought shaping.

Peter makes the point that the quote (which helped to spur the direct marketing industry) can be applied just as fittingly to social computing and media today.  Perhaps if we all go back and re-read and re-digest (or grok for you Heinlein fans out there) Wunderman’s words, we can spur the evolution of the next form of marketing which is surely ready to birth.

If my daughter ever gets detention for doing something like this, I’ll be the first to take her out for ice cream (or whatever the kids consider cool these days):

Now this is a sad story…if it’s true. According to this alleged school report, one student received a detention for using Firefox—as opposed to IE or Safari, we assume. And while there could be plenty of explanations for why the school would want to control student browsers, we loved the teacher’s write-up of the event:

Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a “better” browser and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.

Absolutely sad.

Wired has the story:

Update: Earlier today we posted a story of the Pennsylvania high-schooler who received detention just for using Firefox in lieu of another Internet browser. Looks like this one was a hoax. Apparently the kid actually got in trouble for mouthing off to a teacher after being asked not to surf the Interwebz when he was supposed to be doing a written assignment in Microsoft Word. The supposed faux detention slip is a forgery the kid made after scanning the original.

Google is making a small tweak to Google Reader that increases its “stickiness” even more and competes directly with popular applications such as the FeedHead app within Facebook:

So, we’ve linked up Reader with Google Talk (also known as chat in Gmail) to make your shared items visible to your friends from Google Talk. Once you’ve logged into Reader and been notified of the change, these friends will be able to see your shared items in the Reader left-hand navigation area under “Friends’ shared items”. We’ve provided an option to clear your shared items in case you don’t want your friends to see what you’ve shared in the past. We’ve also added a Settings page so you can choose which friends you see and invite friends who aren’t yet sharing to try it out.

Google Reader is the most popular web-based feed reader on the market and this sort of viral saring will only increase its foothold as RSS, and feed reading in general, continues to climb the mountain to mainstream acceptance.

This also gives a glimpse of the eventual social features that Google will surely build into GMail, GCal, Google Docs and Reader as they continue to move further into the social web.

Marketers would be wise to mind the meme (or at least The Social).

Here’s a screen shot of the profile creating option within Google Reader:

BTW, you can grab the feed or see my shared items from Google Reader here. Feel free to share yours in the comments here as well!

And here’s more on Google’s social profile options for inviting friends:

MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook is tremendous.  I’ve had the handbook for over a month now and haven’t posed a review yet because I’ve taken the time to actually read and ponder all 272 pages.  Normally, I’m not a huge fan of such handbooks or “how-to’s” that pertain to marketing, but the Landing Page Handbook is definitely an exception and proved worth the hours of time I put into reading the whole thing.

Here are the specs from the site:

Research Data & Useful Stats — See how your landing page-related stats compare to 3800 of your peers. Useful for pitching upper management for tests and budgets.

Step-By-Step Instructions — Practical guidelines for each step of landing page design, including copy, graphics, layout, buttons, typeface, video, audio, and top four types of testing. Plus, “skunk works” tips.

Creative Samples & Case Studies — Use as design aids and inspiration for your new landing pages. Includes multivariate test results and real-life marketer’s stories. ( Click for a list of brands featured….)

Specific help for — Search marketing (PPC and SEO), business-to-business marketers, ecommerce sites, email marketers, offline advertisers and even bloggers.

Besides the case studies from major brands, the most enlightening part of the handbook had to be chapter 2 (“Landing Page Design, Layout and Copy Fundamentals”).  That sounds like it would be just a rehash of tips and tricks, but the chapter lays out a number of insights and examples (and helpful charts) that describes, in detail, a successful landing page strategy for higher conversions.  If the handbook had been composed of just chapter 2, I would have been happy with the time investment.

However, all 270+ pages are useful for both online marketing newbies and veterans alike.  That’s not an easy balance to find, but MarketingSherpa found the magic for this publication.

You can find out more about the Landing Page Handbook here.

Flickr announces that they have opened up a stats interface for Premium Members.

We’ve introduced a new feature for our pro members: stats!

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you — we’ve launched another of our most often requested features. Yay!

We’ve designed stats on Flickr to give you all sorts of insight into how people arrive at your photos. If you’re a pro member you can activate your stats now.

There’s more information about stats on Flickr in the FAQs and we’ll be happy to answer your questions and take feedback in this Help Topic.

Very cool for metrics junkies!

AdItAll is an interesting entry into the online video creation space. Aimed at more corporate type companies with little time to adequately create, produce and edit a professional style video, AdItAll combines editing tools typically found on user generated video content sites with a marketplace of various available clips:

As an example, I chose a clip geared towards an office environment which took me to an AJAX pop up to see the video, price (most looked to be in the $300 range for a 10-15 second clip) and choice to edit…

The editing screen includes a number of options and allows the potential buyer to experiment with the soundtrack, voice over, individual frames, images, etc. All in all I was quite impressed with the editing options here…

AdItAll isn’t for everyone, but it certainly is an interesting option for companies looking to include a short and professionally produced (and customizable) web clip on their sites. I don’t see many affiliates using this, but I do see the potential for an affiliate network or CPA network to grab a couple of vids for $300 to enhance their affiliate recruitment or site conversion improvement metrics.

What purpose does Twitter serve for online marketers? Can you successfully “market” something on Twitter?

Yes and no.

Yes: you can market yourself, your ideas, your brand and your positions that down the road equate into real world bottom line numbers.

No: marketing products or services directly on Twitter in a pure performance marketing sense is incredibly difficult. I’ve been on Twitter for over a year and have 500+ followers and people that I’m following (which is a fairly substantial number in Twitterland). I’ve not seen anyone successfully sustain the ability to direct market products or services.

Twitter is an amazing tool for networking, sharing info or marketing yourself or your ideas. It requires patience and the realization that not all marketing is constrained by notions of direct results. Sometimes, the best types of performance marketing are the ones that build on organic interest… the type of interest you can generate on Twitter.

My Twitter account is literally exploding. I blame and thank Jeremiah Owyang (check out the comments and get to adding if you’re a fellow Twitter-er).

Breaking news (oh, and Shawn… if the Affiliate Summit thing doesn’t work out, Bush definitely needs someone who can handle the press the way you did):

GigaOm has an important scoop…

Now I have some skinny on a recent development that could have long-term ramifications, among them Google sending more traffic to Facebook.com.

The company will soon announce that some application canvas pages (ones that don’t require a special login) will become publicly indexable by search engines like Google. So for instance, our GigaOM Question Of The Day app can be indexed and made available in some limited form to people not logged onto Facebook. Apps get a public-facing web presence of their own.

If this is the case, imagine the SEO’ers scratching their head as they try to optimize their FB pages. At any rate, this is as good a reason as any for your company to start taking social media seriously.

Facebook really is boring me with their marketing attempts. I’ve basically begun to snub my nose at it because, quite simply, what they’ve rolled out so far will never work or sustain any sort of revenue for advertisers (or marketers). There are already too many concerns over privacy, data ownership and FB’s long term sustainability as a platform to cause much skirt hiking.

Beacon is a horrible idea and has been sloppily executed. It reminds me of the toolbar apps from 2002.

I like (love?) Facebook as a social network, but as a marketing paradigm, it’s just not a good fit… at least for marketing in its current stage of evolution. Perhaps one day marketing will be able to find employment in social networks, but at this point we’re still too closely linked to offline models and metrics that break down when you try to translate them to the social networking world (or the web in general in my opinion).

Google owns advertising and will continue to do so (especially after they move into mobile and/or release their GDrive application and start paying users to host their data in exchange for ads to compete with Amazon who will do the same… yeah, you heard me).

Tony Hung has a good run down of possible futures for Facebook if Beacon crumbles.

MarketingProfs has a nice piece on the up and coming Seesmic video site. While it is easy to dismiss Seesmic as Yet Another Video Site, there is a good deal of market differentiation which sets Seesmic apart. Think Twitter with video and the ability to really scale once the kids start playing with it:

What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic.

The site is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video.

Seesmic is the brainchild of French blog star Loic Le Meur and aims to do to video conversations what Twitter did to text-based conversations.

And here’s a little video I just did:

http://seesmic.com/Standalone.swf?video=cZDXD40rKt

Video as a Personal Communication Tool

I use Google Reader to plow through about 500 feeds (mostly marketing or tech related) and publicly "share" items that I find particularly interesting throughout the day.

If you’d like to get into the whole RSS or syndication thing but don’t have time to read through a bunch of feeds, you can subscribe to (or just visit) my shared items page.  Consider it a "best-of" the affiliate, search, performance and tech marketing universe.

samharrelson’s shared items

Google Reader -samharrelson’s shared items

Earlier this week I was on a social media panel for the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association in Raleigh, NC with pr guru Peter Shankman.

We were speaking to a highly marketing literate crowd of about 100 or so offline and online companies interested in the social media space.  The question of privacy came up, and Peter made the excellent point that:

"Privacy is currency."

This is an incredibly powerful statement for marketers to keep in mind as we explore and try to find the new metrics that will adequately measure the online space.  I brought up the issue of "attention metrics" and "attention currency" when someone asked about how to monetize Twitter or Facebook.  Looking back, I think Peter’s theory of privacy currency is even more compelling and takes things like attention into its fold.

Keep that in mind when deploying social media campaigns or when attempting to "monetize" Facebook et al.

In relation to Peter’s point, my closing statement went along the lines of "online privacy might be a tightly held currency and an illusion, but permission is not."

In other words, the marketing metrics of the 21st century (both online, offline and in the strange hybrid of relativist space that exists between them) will swing between the pendulums of privacy and permission.