Sam Harrelson

So, the rumors are true.

I am without employment.

I secured an angel investor (and a prominent member of the online marketing community) a few months back who has been keeping me and my growing family afloat while I expound on all things online, affiliate and marketing. However, that arrangement has dissolved and Cost Per Love hasn’t been paying the bills like I hoped it would.

CostPerNews is doing well (check Alexa or Technorati if you’re fool heartedly interested in page views and rank), but it’s not making money. I’m providing consistent daily and high quality content, but no one (besides Shawn and Missy) is paying up. Maybe I haven’t found my philanthropist-in-shining-armor yet, but things are not looking well for the future of this blog at the current pace.

I’d like to keep it going, but funding is required.

So, I have a few questions and I need serious answers asap…

1) Does CostPerNews requisite me keeping it going despite my attempts to stay neutral in tone and objective in nature? In other words, is it worth it for the community?

2) Do you know anyone that is hiring? You’ve seen my content here and at samharrelson.com. I’m a problem solving dreamer who knows how to put the practical to the pedal. If you have doubts, check out my LinkedIn profile.

3) Is there anyone in the space who would hire me and allow me to keep this going? CPA networks, affilaite networks, publishers, online marketers, et al… I’m interested.

People tell me I’m an idiot and that I should charge for the content provided here a la Marketing Sherpa. I don’t think so. I don’t believe that. Information and knowledge should be free and openly available. But I have to eat.

So, please… let me know your thoughts. Or, if you need a problem solving forward thinker (a la Jason Calacanis or Robert Scoble) in your network, affiliate program or marketing platform, please let me know.

Comment below or send thoughts to sam@costpernews.com

Rarely am I as impressed by a new platform online as I am by the new graphical search tool Sidekiq.

Sidekiq is based on Ajax and a few iFrame applications. The great thing about this compared to a Google or Yahoo search is the ability of the subjects of the search to determine their own destiny. Where you are, how you interact and what you do on the web results in your listings. And the listings are thorough.

Some of the categories included in the search are video (YouTube), audio (podcasts), social bookmarks (MySpace, Facebook, et al), employment (my RateMyTeachers.com page shows up), real estate (Zillow, etc), shopping, travel, downloads, movies and a few more.

Results do seem to come from more than just Google as well.

Sidekiq provides an interesting search experience and I highly recommend after playing with it for a few minutes. If only there were a social voting aspect for results, this would be the perfect killer app.  Let’s see SEO tackle this.

Is there still a place for co-regs in the online marketing world?

Now that the $1.25 pay per email and/or zip only offers have finally jumped the shark, it seems that more people in our sphere are re-evaluating the use of registration path offers.

However, international marketers are just beginning to see the boom in the reg path.

Will 2007 bring about an end to the beloved (or hated) platform? With the addition of video and wiser consumers, I think so.  There are some really fun and interesting hybrid reg path technologies coming online this year so stay tuned.

Affiliate Summit is quickly approaching (January 21-23). If you haven’t registered yet, go there now and take care of that. This Summit is going to be well worth your time, money and effort, so make sure you don’t miss it.

Now that the hotel rooms at Bally’s are basically sold out, I think it’s kosher to let you know that Wayne Porter and I have decided to do something a little drastic, crazy and completely unorthodox for this year’s Affiliate Summit West.

Instead of staying at a hotel, we’re going to camp from the Friday to Tuesday during the Summit at nearby Lake Mead National Recreation Area. It’s about a 30 min trip, but I think it will be a blast.

We’re renting a car for the back-and-forth to the conference downtown, so feel free to tag along to AffiliateCamp Beta with us. Anyone is welcome to come out and spend the night with the stars, a nice fire, some strategy talks and a little Hunter S. inspired craziness.

So, let us know if you’d like to be a part of the beta test of AffiliateCamp. This is in no way a profit generating event. We’re just camping out in the desert and giving it a fun name since we’re in town for a conference.

In some ways, this is part of my own attempt to completely open source my life. We’ll see how it goes!

Linda Buquet has posted about the new TUMRI CornerStore marketing widget.

And the best part??? Set it and forget it! Let Tumri take care of everything for you!

I’ll let you read her post for more information, but this is a neat little tool for affiliates to sink their teeth into. It’s only the fourth day of 2007 and widgets are beginning to claim their place as the most talked about new marketing platform this year.

It’s no secret that eBay is doing a number of interesting things with its open API’s and technology platform.

Sharing APIs is common practice for software companies, but eBay, along with its fellow online-retail pioneer, Amazon.com, is breaking new ground in its industry by establishing a large community of outside developers. And the implications of this strategy go much further than the world of auctions and electronic storefronts.

How much is eBay relying on outside developers?

“This a new wave of business,” says [another developer’s marketing director]. “eBay is a supplier, a marketing channel and a competitor. It’s a weird arrangement.”… “If you can’t split it, you can’t scale it,” says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. “We’ve made ourselves masters of virtualization.’ … eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks, adding 100,000 lines of code, all while in use.”

What does all of this matter for online marketing? A great deal if you consider the implications of web2.0 in a practical sense.

“This is what Web 2.0 does for business,” says Infopia CEO Bjorn Espenes. “Everyone can pick and share information in different ways that are much more automated.”

Platforms such as Linux have been relying on outside developers for over a decade, and the result is an impressive number of stable and attractive distributions which are beginning to compete with the traditional OS’s such as Windows and Mac OS.

Affiliate marketing has long been at the threshold of taking advantage of these sorts of open platforms with data feeds and arguably the very affiliate link structure of the market.

If eBay’s continued use of API’s and open platforms and reliance on outside developers and talent is any indication of future trends by software and online portals, affiliate marketing has a bright future.