Category: Marketing

I absolutely love Remember The Milk. I’ve been an active (and heavy) user for well over a year and upgraded to their “Pro” level (best $25 you’ll spend this year) to take full advantage of their BlackBerry and iPod Touch syncing capabilities. Not to mention, they have amazing integration with GMail and your task lists stay in sync and in front of you whether you’re in GMail, on your mobile or on the web.

Obviously, I can’t recommend Remember The Milk enough. Honestly. Stop what you’re doing and go sign up if you already haven’t.

Anyway, my endorsement aside, they now have a designated app in the Apple App Store (for iPhone and Touch users). It’s free for Pro users (and works great as usual).

Remember The Milk – Blog: “To say that we were excited when Apple made it possible to start developing native apps earlier this year would be a massive understatement (we’re big iPhone fans!). There was no question that we’d be developing an app for the iPhone and iPod touch… the only question was, ‘how big?’ :)”

Go support a great company, team and platform that is constantly innovating… RTM is the embodiment of what we’ve all been asking for web2.0 in terms of real functionality and a business plan. Vote with your feet and head over there.

(end rant)

Hard to believe…

Congrats to the CJ team and here’s to the next decade of more innovation.

btw, the ability to only embed certain parts of a clip from Hulu is fantastic…

http://www.hulu.com/embed/adjaWvGmgDIOP7dfQqiyQQ/201/238

Hulu – The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 – Watch the full episode now.

The Obama ’08 iPhone app has won great applause from techies and geeks (not just because it’s from Obama) for it’s inventiveness and nifty viral nature for getting out the vote and educating potential or current supporters.

Now it looks as if Sen John McCain’s campaign has gotten into the act (tongue-in-cheek):

Good stuff, my friends.

Google has just announced its support for OpenID across its services. Yahoo and Microsoft have also adopted the “one-sign-in” OpenID platform as well.

That’s great news and great for users and people moving to the cloud with applications like GMail or Google Docs or Google Calendar. Best of all, you can use that same ID to login into a number of web apps that aren’t owned by one company such as Google.

This is incredibly important for the growth of cloud computing as more productivity moves to the web.

However, when will publishers be able to use a platform like OpenID to login to CJ or Linkshare or Motive’s Advent or LinkConnector or Azoogle or ShareASale or even the Google Affiliate Network?

I have a myriad of ill-thought out affiliate network logins that I simply can’t remember. Being able to login to a network with something like an OpenID would make that network a favorite of mine by default!

I can haz?

There’s a new software update for the Kindle that evidently improves (the already pretty awesome) battery life. I can go for days and days of heavy reading and not have to recharge.

And yes, I still freaking love my Kindle. Game changer!

EduKindle » Blog Archive » Kindle Battery Life and Release 1.04 (and 1.08): “What release is your Kindle running? Go to ‘home,’ scroll to ‘settings’ and click. At the very bottom of the settings screen you will see the version of the Kindle software you are running. If it is 1.0, go here to figure out how to upgrade to 1.04 (or 1.08, for that matter).”

So, for all the new converts to Kindle-ism, make sure you have the new update.

ShareASale has launched a really interesting new platform with the Gift Cards Database. Let’s face it… gift cards are the gift to give when you have no idea what to give. Plus, merchants love them given that the cards are such a money machine.

I’ll be interested to check in with the SaS team after the holidays and see how popular or successful this becomes. I have a feeling it could be a huge hit.

ShareASale Blog » Blog Archive » Gift Cards Database: “Thanks to a wonderful suggestion from our annual ShareASale Think Tank held a few weeks ago in San Diego, we’ve created a Gift Cards Database. Merchants are able to upload specific creatives that direct consumers to specific landing pages designed to sell Gift Cards – a popular item this time of year!

In similar form to the Deals Database, Affiliates can access these creatives from inside their Affiliate Interface as well as through RSS feeds and downloadable databases. Affiliates can also search for specific types of gift cards – and find/join programs that they might not have already been a part of.”

Additionally, it’s these sorts of platforms that will continue to make affiliate marketing more “mainstream” as large publishing sites turn away from CPM ad deals towards performance marketing given the economic slowdown. In a potentially bleak holiday selling season, this could be just the thing to make things a little cheerier for publishers.

Nice work, ShareASale.

bla bla bla.

LinkedIn is still a PITA…

LinkedIn Means Business With New Application Platform: “LinkedIn has launched its new OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps – an answer to the platforms found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but without the clutter and ‘junk’ apps that plague those sites. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn apps must go through an approval process before they will go live on the store, and all apps must be deemed ‘professional’ in purpose to appear on the business-oriented social network. To prevent an overwhelming amount of clutter, users will be restricted to including a maximum of 15 applications on their main profile pages, though they will eventually have the option to install more apps on a separate page.”

Sorry, but I wish it would just die.

Please, don’t add me on LinkedIn. kthxbye.

LinkShare is making good use of its new blog with the announcement of a series of upcoming publisher training web seminars:

Publisher Training Web Seminars | LinkShare Blog: “LinkShare now offers interactive web seminars for our Publishers. These sessions will cover Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced level training to help you make the most of your LinkShare partnership.”

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, or LinkShare, this could really be a helpful series. Or if you’re an old hack and familiar with their “1.0” interface but still have some questions over the new interface that was implemented earlier this year (like I do), this could be a big help.

I’ll try to listen in on a few of these and report back here.

YouTube has passed Yahoo to become the #2 search engine…

TG Daily – YouTube surpasses Yahoo as world’s #2 search engine: “ComScore’s most U.S. search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft’s MSN sites.”

What does this mean for affiliates?

Here are three initial thoughts:

1) Affiliate marketers need to be supplementing content with video (hosted on YouTube).

2) Affiliates need to be making sure that their video endeavors are viewer and keyword friendly. In other words, although it is great to load up your videos with highly sought after terms, you also need to make your video enjoyable, memorable and personable. Are you not that interesting? Hire someone or start reading blogs about marketers using video (like Jim Kukral‘s).

3) Think outside the text paradigm and implement (YouTube hosted) video anywhere you can in your affiliate campaigns.

I know affiliate marketers who spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on Yahoo and MSN, which are now behind YouTube in terms of search volume. You might not have thousands of dollars to spend on search, but you do have the time and creativity to make good (and even viral) videos. Be creative and explore. You never know what will catch on.

In an email to affiliates / publishers this week, LinkShare’s co-Presidents (seems to be a popular trend with affiliate networks these days) laid out their plans to address the past downtimes and what the network is doing to head off any possible troubles during the holiday rush.

Even though this holiday shopping season is not expected to set record amounts of sells by any means, the November to January time frame normally is the boom time for affiliates and online merchants (especially in terms of retail merchants).

The full email is below…

Dear Valued Partners:

At this busy time of year for all of us, we wanted to take a moment to update you with some important information on how LinkShare is prepared to handle the expected increase in transaction volume in November and December.

Over the past several months we have experienced intermittent challenges with the performance and presentation of data in our reporting systems. First, we want to say thank you for your patience and your understanding as we have worked through these issues. Second, we want to emphasize that our core capability to capture and track clicks and transactions continues to be the most robust and precise in the industry.

We are happy to report that we have made great strides in all areas. Here is a summary of our current progress:

Account Access
We recently identified and resolved a database problem that was preventing user access to our systems during peak usage times. Since implementing and monitoring this fix last week, we are confident that prolonged, unannounced downtimes are unlikely.
Data Quality
The intermittent downtime we were experiencing contributed in many cases to inconsistent data in our reporting systems. The interruption in sequence and flow of data from the main database (MainDB) to our reporting servers created a lag in the system’s ability to present the most up-to-date information. Now that data access issues have been resolved many of the reporting issues will also be resolved.

However, there are currently some infrequent, yet persistent inconsistencies in the data in SynergyAnalytics that we are investigating. We are also improving the performance of Traditional Reporting and working to resolve remaining data inconsistencies. We expect to make swift progress in these areas in the coming weeks.

Investing in the Future
Over the last 10 months, we’ve made significant investments in our systems. We have replaced our data center networks, reinforced our database systems, upgraded our ad and click servers, assigned additional servers to existing services to allow for increased capacity and automated fail-over, and installed a new software system to monitor and report on performance. These investments have prepared us to handle not only the additional load we expect in November and December, but well into the future.

In our effort to be as transparent as possible, we want to make you aware of some upcoming scheduled maintenance windows over the next few weeks:

Thursday, October 23, 2008 5:00pm – 9:00pm EDT (GMT-4) – Regularly scheduled software release.

Thursday, November 6, 2008 5:00pm – 8:00pm EST (GMT-5) – The last scheduled software release of the year.

On behalf of the entire team at LinkShare, we truly appreciate your business and your patience. We look forward to building even stronger partnerships and wish you strong sales during the 2008 holiday season.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Levine
Co-President

Yaz Iida
Co-President