Sam Harrelson

Recently, there have been numerous discussions of hysterics, drama and link baiting by those in the affiliate marketing industry who blog. This discussion has run its course in other sectors of the online marketing and advertising spheres (think TechCrunch, TechMeme and the “echo chamber” discussion if you follow those conversations in the blogosphere).

In the spirit of FTC full disclosure: I think links are dead (that’s not hysterics and extends well outside of “affiliate” marketing), and view link baiting as pretty much worthless. The traffic you get from such antics rarely results in a conversion to reader based on the metrics and experiments I’ve run on my personal blog, so I prefer to engage people’s attention rather than their browser url. My LinkedIn profile is open to full view, so please take a look at that if you want to see where I’ve been, what I’ve done and what it might tell you about my own worldview within the context of affiliate marketing.

So, here are my questions and you’re free to add more:

• Is there a place for blogging in the affiliate world?
• Should it be all practical based or should there also be some speculation, theories and future thinking?
• Is there a litmus test for who you read based on their experience in the industry?

Please send me your stickers for my new laptop. The laptop is a new Sony Vaio VGN-FE770G running Ubuntu Linux, and I want to cover the top of the machine with pretty stickers featuring my favorite companies.

What’s in it for you? Exposure at many online industry conferences (such as Affiliate Summit this January) and various online marketing meetings and conferences.

Send your sticker(s) to:
Sam Harrelson
7 Lookout Road East
Asheville, NC 28805

I’ll make a post about who sends stickers with a link to your site, affiliate program, affiliate network, CPA network or blog.

Here’s what the laptop looks like so far (that top sticker is a quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi that a friend provided, and yes I recognize the irony of having an Apple sticker on a Sony laptop… that’s the point)…

The PepperJam Blog has an interesting account of a recent interaction with Yahoo over a potentially fraudulent situation involving unusual click numbers.

I suggest reading the entire account there, but here’s an interesting snippet…

FROM YAHOO (e-mail #2):

Thank you for your patience while our Loss Prevention team reviewed your activity….

In response to your concerns about the click activity your account has received, we have issued a goodwill credit to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account balance in the amount of $X,XXX.XX for clicks that were billed to your account during the period of November 19, 2006, to November 27, 2006.

Please note that we have issued this credit as a measure of goodwill and appreciation for your business. Please allow up to five business days for the adjustment to appear in your account.

Who says Google and Yahoo are all about automation?

Please help me fill in the gaps. Full list to be published and distributed next Friday (December 22)…

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Post your ideas in the comments or send me an email.

Google will begin to offer domains for $10 a year in partnership with GoDaddy.

“Hey, wait, Costin,” you say. “That’s great for them, but our organization doesn’t have a custom domain.”

Well, I’m excited to let you know that we’ve made signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain much easier for those of you that don’t yet have your own domain. We’ve partnered with GoDaddy.com and eNom, two leading domain registration services, to offer domains for $10 per year. And I like the fact that we’re including private registration to protect your personal information.

Now you’ve got one-stop shopping for all the services currently on the Google Apps for Your Domain platform — just find a domain, buy it, and get started. We’ll do all the behind-the-scenes configuration work for you. For now this is available for .com, .net,.org, .biz, and .info domains, but we’re working on bringing it elsewhere soon.

The Google Domain Registration service will result from a partnership with GoDaddy and eNom. Google is integrating the service with its Google Apps for Your Domain, which they are hoping to use to entice more people to their Google Pages and Checkout service.

So, the question begs… what is Google hoping to gain by providing free and easy web sites to small companies?

Schmuel Tennenhaus is gathering quite a bit of publicity for his latest YouTube offering on the merger of AT&T and SBC.

“This matter is auspicious, ATT has good wishes, FCC don’t be vicious, wash the dishes,” Schmuel raps between suggestive finger wags. “BellSouth is so hot, merger-licious.”

I’m a huge fan of the Flaming Lips, so using this platform to plug their music doesn’t seem like such a bad idea when they are engaging in such cutting edge fan interaction as this.

You can submit a video to the Flaming Lips YouTube channel to see if you’re good enough to dance with the band during their New Year’s Eve show in LA. Dancing with the band is a time honored tradition, and normally involves some sort of animal suit. It’s strange, but that’s what community is all about.

This New Year’s Eve the Flaming Lips have decided they want to add a special guest to their line up…you.

This is your chance to be a part of the psychedelic cacophony that is the Lips. Your directive: To film yourself in short-form, auditioning to be a member of the Lips on-stage dance troupe; In-costume, showcasing your skills.

Submit your audition video for a chance to win a place on stage dancing with the Flaming Lips during their New Year’s Eve 2007 show in Los Angeles!

Sound good? Well, we think it sounds great.

The band has also put up all of their videos on their YouTube channel. Now that’s just awesome.

If you haven’t seen the Lips live, it’s up there with hearing Brian Littleton playing Rocket Man.

No big surprise here…

DoubleClick Inc., the premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, today announced the results of a study centered on determining how companies can focus marketing investments to impact the role “word of mouth” plays in purchase decisions. The study, titled “Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth,” is part of a series of reports based on DoubleClick’s Touchpoints IV survey of online consumers.

The DoubleClick Touchpoints IV survey results revealed that influencers consider online advertising a key factor of their shopping process, second only to websites, as a source of further learning about purchase decisions. Nineteen percent of influencers cited web advertising as a source of information when they were researching a purchase, compared to 8 percent among the remainder of the sample. Both segments cited websites as their top source of research when they are shopping, but influencers clearly rely more on the web than non-influencers, with 40 percent of influencers citing websites for this purpose versus 31 percent of non-influencers.

More interesting stats and methodologies to chew on, so check out the press release about the survey here.

Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille released the second episode of Affiliate Thing today.

The show started with the latest buzz about the Federal Trade Commission potentially regulating affiliate marketing, and moved on to sending out gifts to business friends at Christmas, an interview with eBay affiliate manager Lily Shen, the next issue of Revenue magazine, and a charity fundraiser at Affiliate Summit.

The interview with Lily from eBay is particularly interesting. I’ve been watching their API technology since discussing all things mashable with eBay’s Alan Lewis at last summer’s Affiliate Summit East.

eBay is doing some interesting things on the affiliate side and seem to be more amenable to the affiliate industry than Google (considering the Checkout situation at the moment). Lily even stresses the importance of relationships and communities in building eBay’s present and future success, which was nice to hear.

Shawn and Lisa seemed more comfortable with the format and the conversation at the beginning of the show was entertaining. It’s a good listen and seems that the quality will continue to improve each week.

On next week’s Affiliate Thing, a mysterious Mr. X will be giving an interview. My money is on Molander.

Who knows… Shawn might even end up with a coveted monkey phone call from Porter on next week’s show.

Here’s the mp3 of Affiliate Thing 2

Phase 2 of the Cost Per Network, a finalized and full feature functional Cost Per Jobs, is almost ready to roll out for the public. The plan is to unveil the complete interface for the Cost Per Jobs service on Friday. I’ve put a ton of work into the site, trying to make it as intuitive and user friendly as possible while still retaining enough functionality and depth for users.

There will be two main sections – one for job seekers and one for those posting jobs. Job searches can be made by location, keywords, types, requirements, etc. The search functionality is very deep, and that is the place where we’ve put the most work into making the site different from other solutions.

The beta tests have proven successful so far, and we’re still kicking the tires to make sure that everything loads quickly and correctly.

So, if all continues to go well, the new interface will replace the existing one this Friday.

Thanks to everyone who has helped in the testing and those of you who have sent in emails giving quality suggestions about what you’d like to see to make this a valuable service for the online and affiliate industries. Let me know if you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see included!

Phase 3 of the Cost Per Network should be rolling out sometime around Affiliate Summit West, so you’ll be hearing more about that soon 🙂

Network Solutions, best known for their domain registration, SSL certificate technology and web hosting launched a new CPC platform, PerformanceClick.

“We’ve found that most businesses find the process of running successful pay per click advertising campaigns to be very complex and time consuming,” said Champ Mitchell, chairman and CEO of Network Solutions.

“That’s why our team of online marketing experts will do the work for them by researching and selecting the right keywords that help maximize sales on their Web sites.”

The service is similar to other CPC platform where a company pays a monthly amount for a number of clicks every month and consultation on how to maximize the result of their ad expenditure across the channels associated with CPC.

Scanbuy, a six year old mobile marketing company has secured $9 million in Series B funding from Longworth Ventures.

Scanbuy’s technology allows consumers to access mobile commerce and mobile marketing services in a simple and intuitive way. Scanbuy’s barcode-capture technology and services platforms are designed for handset manufacturers, wireless carriers, content providers and retailers to enable swift navigation from the handset to the physical world. Scanbuy is widely acknowledged as the leading solution provider in this emerging market which displays strong growth potential for the consumer wireless market throughout the world.

The funds will escalate growth of Scanbuy’s go-to-market efforts, extend its standard 1D and 2D bar code technology leadership in mobile marketing, and expand its operational capabilities to support growing worldwide adoption of the company’s solutions designed to provide a range of information and services to consumers via their mobile devices.

Along with news of their increased funding, Scanbuy also announced the appointment of Jonathan Bulkeley as Chief Executive Officer.  Bulkeley oversaw barnesandnoble.com through its initial phases into it’s IPO phase.  He also has experience with Sparks Network, IGN and AOL.

Mobile bar scanning technologies continue to amaze me.  When will the affiliate networks start promoting mobile coupons that could be sent from one phone to another?

We’ve all played with Panama by this point, but yesterday the service launched to the general public (without much fanfare or blogging coverage)…

BURBANK, Calif., Dec 12, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that its new search marketing platform, known by its code name, Panama, is now available to advertisers that wish to open a new Yahoo! sponsored search account. Beginning today, U.S. businesses of all sizes can sign up online to begin marketing their products and services through Yahoo!’s easy-to-use, completely redesigned system.

Previously, the system was only open to Yahoo!’s existing search marketing customers that wanted to transition from the old system over to the new platform.

Yahoo is slowly moving over all existing search customers to the new platform. Project Panama does seem to be successful in streamlining Yahoo’s search offerings. However, I’m not sure how much of a dent even an improved Yahoo service will cut into AdSense. One contact referred to this as “Yahoo’s Zune compared to Google’s iPod.”

Have you played with Panama yet? Impressions?

During his “Lighting Round” picks last night (December 12), CNBC’s popular stock analyst and personality Jim Cramer included a short quip about two of online advertising’s biggest players…

aQuantive (AQNT): ‘AQNT and VCLK … These are companies that help the digital media transformation.’
ValueClick (VCLK): ‘These are companies that are beneficiaries of the fact that TV and radio and newspapers are losing… they’re winning.’

His comment on Cisco during that same segment was also interesting…

Cisco (CSCO): ‘ They’re best in show.’

I was hoping for more detail from him on his predictions for ValueClick. Their stock continues to soar after a downturn in July. They are attracting more and more attention as online advertising continues to eat into the once hegemonic grip of traditional styles of marketing and show increasing signs of ROI and flexibility.

Could this be signs of a major acquisition in the space in near future?

[Disclosure: I do not own stock in any of the companies above and this is opinionated commentary, not advice on stocks that you should purchase. ]

The Washington Post reports that the FTC is getting involved in the PayPerPost debacle…

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.

In my opinion, this should be a self-regulating and self-cleaning mechanism built into the world of online marketing. We should have the ability, and the foresight, to see these types of marketing schemes for what they are… manipulation marketing.

However, considering how vocal some “marketers” are about sketchy practices such as AdSense arbitrage, splogs, and the the inability of reason and the common good to control the market for the benefit of everyone, it seems that the FTC has to get involved to reign in the craziness. Pay per content schemes, whether they be explicit or tacit are not healthy for the blogging scheme, and do not provide bloggers and individuals with a long term sustainable way to make a living.

Provide good content, write about what you love and the traffic will come. You don’t need high stakes SEO or short term pay per post schemes to make a dollar, or an impact, in the blogging world.

So what does this mean for affiliate marketing?

Are links dead?

Jason Calacanis’ keynote from this year’s Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is worth a listen or two. Done in an interview style with Danny Sullivan, the keynote has been made famous for it’s “SEO is bullshit” declaration. While that is an interesting point to ponder, some of the other statements Jason made caught my attention as well. For example, near the end he says that his personal motto might be “make it suck less” in terms of internet platforms and programs.

Here’s the link to the interview in mp3 (made available by WebMasterRadio).

Jason got me thinking about my recent launch of CostPerJobs. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into the backend of the site and service, and I hope it shows when the site makes its formal Debutante Ball appearance (I’m from South Carolina where we still have such things).

When the formal interface makes its debut, I want the site to be something useful. I’m not as interested in monetizing the site as many people in the industry tell me I should be, but I’ve often considered job listings and helping connect people or businesses needing quality help with the people in online marketing who could provide that quality as lacking. Having been in the position of trying to find the next forward thinking company from an employee point-of-view, I know that it is lacking.

So, in order to make CostPerJobs suck less (even though you won’t see the completed project until Friday), I’d like for your help/input/insight into the following questions or any other topics you can think of to make this a valuable resource for our community:

• Should I charge a fee for listings or make it a free service?
• What features would you like to see on CostPerJobs (RSS, email subscriptions, keyword searching, etc)?
• Should CostPerJobs look like CostPerNews or should it have its own distinctive appearance and interface?
• How much of a role should automation play?
• How could this site best be utilized for the improvement of our community?

Please share your feedback. I’m not interested in making millions or thousands off of the site, but I do want it to serve as a needed resource in our industry and community.

Come to think of it, use this as a chance to tell me how to make CostPerNews suck less. If there’s something you don’t like about the site, or something you wish was here, don’t hesitate to post it in the comments or send me an email.

Thanks so much!

This is not too surprising in my book judging from the popularity of platforms such as GMail, feed readers, social bookmarking sites and social networks…

Fifty-seven percent of 1,100 surveyed respondents said they would provide demographic information in exchange for a more personalized online experience, and 34 percent of respondents said they would allow sites to track their clicks and purchases.

What do you think?

(Thanks to Jeff Doak for the tip.)

Google blogger Matt Cutts has responded to criticism that Google blatantly ripped off a Yahoo promotion page for the download of IE7 in a blistering detail of how Yahoo has taken liberally from Google’s own AdSense templates in the design of their own promotional ads…

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

However, this situation points to something endemic to our current American society based on our cookie-cutter educational institutions which are producing citizens with the skills to know how to cut and paste rather well without the ability to think creatively and critically. This sort of copying occurs more than frequently in affiliate marketing, whether it’s campaign creative, network interfaces or promotional materials. So, let’s all use this as a reason to look at our own programs and discover how we might be able to do something a little differently than how everyone else is doing, whatever your rank in online marketing.

Both of these companies are stocked full of highly intelligent engineers and designers, so let’s all shake hands and go our separate ways making the web more Ajaxy…

Following Anik’s (from AffiliateClassroom.com) lead, I made an ornament out of the thoughtful Season’s Greetings card from Shawn Collins. The making of the ornament involved a scissor hack which modified the card beyond its terms of use, but the placement which the ornament will receive is of much higher quality and traffic than the card would ever get based on all of those other non-relevant contextual cards.

I’ve added the “ornament” to our Harrelson Family Holiday Chair…

And here’s the closeup of the newly added Shawn Collins ornament (along with C3PO)…

Do you send out a Holiday note to your partners? You should. Shawn’s package made my day and as a result I’m subconsciously more willing to do more business with him in 2007. Don’t underestimate the power of the Holiday Card!

And now for the important question…what did YOU do with your Shawn Collins Christmas Package?

My beautiful wife and I are contemplating the idea of having a baby in 2007, so the story of James Kim and his family’s ordeals still brings a river of tears to my eyes, even as I write this post.

My wife is a physician and spends an inordinate amount of time working in the hospital, so when we went out to dinner last Wednesday at our favorite restaurant here in Asheville, she had not heard about the Kim family ordeal and the discovery of James’ body as he was attempting to travel in the bitter cold of an Oregon winter to find help for his family.  As I tried to relate the story to her over our noodles and vegetables, I broke down thinking about one of our own tech-savvy colleagues and the ordeals he and his family must have gone through during those cold and lonely nights stranded in the wilderness.

I’ve been trying to find a way to donate or give something to the Kim family during the Holidays in order that these emotions and feelings of empathy might not go away in vain.  A friend passed along this link to jamesandkati.com.

If you would like to forward on words of hope and encouragement to the Kim and Fleming families please send a note to friendsandfamily@jamesandkati.com and we will gather them up to pass on. Please send an email with your thoughts and prayers. We appreciate all of the thoughts and prayers and will pass along emails to the Kim and Fleming families. We will also be creating a time capsule for the girls, so that in their future they will know what a great man and a hero James was to his family. The capsule will include these emails, examples of James work at TechTV and CNet, and news reports about their dad.

So in the midst of all of our crass commercialization during the Holidays, please consider visiting the site and using the PayPal option to donate funds to the Kim family.  Send along the link and let others know that they can donate to the family there as well.

The Google Strikes Back.

Jason Calacanis spotted this comment from Matt Cutts regarding Google’s detection and devaluation of paidperpost content in Google rankings…

“Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.”

So if you want to keep your prestige (and ranking / rating) with Google, you might want to re-evaluate the use of PayPerPost and ReviewMe type offers.

Some would argue about the issue of fairness, but in the free market economy of the WWW, Google can and should be able to set whatever policies it sees fit being in the dominant share of the market for user trustworthiness.

I suspect Yahoo and MSN do the same with regards to paid content such as PaidPerPost but have been waiting on word from Google to make their own declarations about these emerging platforms.

Video has matured from a realm of amateur user generated content into a platform for compelling online media according to a new whitepaper from Universal McCan and KnowledgeStorm.  Of the 5,300 technology and B2B buyers surveyed in the study, over 60% said that they accessed video on a daily basis for the purpose of business and not entertainment.

“The takeaway of all of these surveys is that we are really in stage two of the opportunity for online marketing and advertising,” said Matt Lohman, KnowledgeStorm’s director of market research. “There is a whole wave of opportunity to extend marketing campaigns and programs via things like blogs, podcasts and various video formats. The sky’s the limit in terms of the ways to be effective on the Internet and really measure results. This stuff is not a fad that’s going away.”

Of the three topics explored in the latest survey, video is making the broadest impact today. More than 63% of respondents access video at least weekly, while the same percentage said they access video primarily for business and technology information?not entertainment. Webcasting was the most commonly accessed form of Web video at 70%, but all sorts of types scored well. Overall, 78.1% of respondents said video “makes online content more compelling,” while 57% said video content had influenced a b-to-b technology buying decision.

I found it interesting that video had such a high rate of adoption in the B2B community already.  In this case, it seems that the B2C community may be behind the B2B crowd in terms of adoption of video as a viable and valuable platform because B2C still seems to be sorting out the evolving and rapidly growing space and trying to determine a proper metric and even place for advertisements on the platform.

Nevertheless, expect for video to blossom in 2007.

Wired News has a full length feature on the rising prominence of RSS and feed subscriptions within the platforms of shopping aggregations sites such as Mpire, Offertrax and StyleFeeder.

The extensive use of RSS technology shows that these shopping sites are consciously moving away from traditional methods of communication like e-mail, which has become less reliable for alerting users to money-saving deals.

As Offertrax’s Carcio points out, e-mail has been so badly abused by spammers that RSS, blogs, opt-in offers and other “user-controlled technologies” will soon become the most effective way for sellers to reach out to interested buyers.

With the continued devaluation of email’s effectiveness in the face of growing consumer mobile texting and instant message usage and the Hobbesian state of most people’s inboxes due to spam and spoofs, it is little wonder that these major shopping portals are turning to subscription feeds such as RSS and Atom. Such feeds are easily transportable in an offline environment and allow consumers the chance to receive the information they are seeking in a quick, clean and pain-free environment. Placing your latest coupon or product discount in a user’s email inbox alongside the deluge of spam and garbage does harm to your own brand as well.

With the implementation of RSS in IE7 and Vista, will the scale finally tip towards a feed based nature of online conversation? Has your program taken steps to make this transition an easy and profitable one?

I’m excited to announce that CostPerJobs is launching tonight.

CostPerJobs is in a very scaled down mode until this Friday when the full GUI will be available after more testing, but the basic nuts and bolts are up and available for your use.

Best of all, listings are only $25 per month until the end of December. After the beginning of the New Year the rates will go higher. Also, the most recent job listings will be featured on a widget here on the front page of CostPerNews. So you’re getting exposure to the thousands of online marketing and affiliate marketing professionals who visit CostPerNews each day.

So, give it a spin and see what you think. Let me know if you have any ideas or things that you’d like to see in the full GUI release on Friday as it’s not to late to make a few changes there.

Oh, and the first company to make a listing gets a free 125×125 banner spot here on the main page for a week (valued at $125).

From the Google Checkout blog…

Starting today, merchants will be able to use existing affiliate tracking and analytics tools for sales through Google Checkout. You can now include a pixel URL with parameters in the cart post and it will be included on the Checkout Thank You page. You’ll also be able to include placeholders for dynamic variables that will be populated before calling the URL. For more details, refer to third-party conversion tracking in the Google Checkout API documentation.

And here are more technical details on Google’s support for third party conversion tracking.

Quick fix or long term solution?