Sam Harrelson

YouTube Now #2 in Search: What Does That Mean for Affiliates?

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.

Google Doesn’t Hate Your Blogging Platform

I saw, via FriendFeed, that Garry Conn had done a very informal “test” of how Google ranks its own Blogger blogging product over competitors such as WordPress.com by doing a simple search for “blog.”

Here are his results:

Does Google Hate WordPress and Other Blog Platforms?: “I don’t know why I did it, I guess I was just bored, but for some reason I decided to Google the term: blog to see what kind of results I would get. WordPress, TypePad or any other blog publishing platform is not mentioned on the first page results. In fact, the top ten results for the term blog have three instances that promote or have an direct affiliation with Google.”

The problem with this approach is that when I search for “blogs” using the same methodology as Garry, I get this:

Sure, you can draw the assumption that Google “hates” WordPress, Typepad (even though Seth Godin’s Typepad blog appears in Garry’s image), etc from doing a search for “blog” but does that really mean that Google puts its own Blogger product ahead of other blogging platforms in its results? Of course not. WordPress.com (or .org) blogs are incredibly popular and easily to rank high in Google as are Typepad blogs, MovableType blogs, Tumblr blogs, Twitter micro-blogs, etc.

Yes, it’s 2008, but content is still king. Make good content yada yada. Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

Why You Should Avoid the Google Slap

People in the online marketing world like to pound their chest and declare their independence from Google’s firm grasp over the online marketing landscape.

However, that’s just not a realistic business plan unless you have a boatload of venture capital as backup (or a trust fund).

I’m guessing most affiliate marketers have neither.

Pop!Tech: Is Larry Page the Ben Bernake of the Internet? | Design of the Times | Fast Company: “‘Google measures somebody’s reputational assets, turns it into a page rank, and determines search traffic,’ says Anderson. That traffic can then be converted to money. Think of the conversion this way: Links to page rank to search to traffic to ads to money. Like currency conversion rates in international banking, the conversion rate for reputation is now getting quite formal.

‘We now have a central banker for the internet economy,’ Anderson says. ‘Larry page is the Ben Bernake of the Google economy, since he controls page rank.’ “

In other words, (to paraphrase Willie Nelson) if you’re gonna dance at the affiliate marketing prom, you gotta pay the (Google) band.

Stay clean, stay away from paid links and paid posts and don’t rely too heavily on the tea leaves. In other words, make good use of Google’s WebMaster Central if you want to be successful.

LinkShare Addresses Downtime and Preps for Holidays

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

Finding web2.0 Affiliate Domain Names

This weekend, I found a nifty new domain registering search engine called Domainr.

If you’re looking for a more fun “web2.0” themed name for your next affiliate site, definitely check this out…

Give your domain search a happy ending.

There’s a whole world of domains out there—hundreds at the top-level and even more beyond—Domainr helps you explore them all. Some of our favorites are burri.to, fortuito.us and gu.st.

I’ve grabbed a couple of coupon themed sites using the service. Now, if I only had the time to build them all.

Domainr

My Hero: Prof Larry McGehee

To me, Larry McGehee is Wofford College.

This morning, Rion called me and said “we were waking up in a world without Larry.” It still hasn’t hit me yet, but that’s tough. I’m not sure when it will hit me.

As a little bit of background, Larry McGehee was the quirky professor/teacher/friend/mentor/hero that you always see in the movies but never meet in real life. And when you did meet him, you never got past the sly grin and warm heart. His office was a safe haven for the misfits, troublemakers, rabble rousers, jocks, geeks, dorks, eggheads, frat boys, Bible thumpers and homecoming queens.

I’ve often wondered what the Kingdom of God might look like here on earth. Little did I know it was there in Larry’s upstairs office in the Papadopoulos Building. With images of Shaker art and pictures with students over the years (not to mention the books… all the books), his little office was not of this world.

Larry was known for his poignant yet whimsical writing as well as his madras jackets (especially among the students of his Religion 340 class of which I was honored to be a part):

One of my favorite sides of Larry was his interaction with students on Facebook. Up until the end, he was there with a tongue-in-cheek:

“Oct 10: Larry is notiicing that 80% of the Wofford students have more travel experience than Sarah Palin!”

I also loved Larry for his amazing ability to synthesize religion, politics and history. Beyond his SouthernSeen collection, nowhere is that more apparent than in these three Amazon reviews he did.

I traded emails with Larry just a few days ago after I found an 8 year old stack of emails between us that I had printed out. I had just moved to New Haven, CT to start my first year at Yale and wound up living across the street from where he and Betsy lived when they were in New Haven. Larry was the absolute reason I went to Yale. Those emails are absolute treasures. We both had a good laugh about them.

Larry passed on to me a number of things over the years between books, banners, ideas, optimisms and hugs. The one thing I’ll cherish the most is the knowledge that he was always there with a sly grin and open car door to a meal at Ike’s. He still is.

Love you much, Larry.