Sam Harrelson

The Kids Are All Coding; Why Aren’t You?

I’m working with a group of 6th-8th grade girls in our Middle School who easily blew past the first five or so lessons on CodeAcademy today.

I was impressed how quickly and easily they groked ideas like substrings and declaring variables. Turns out they aren’t the only ones interested in coding…

Codecademy’s CodeYear Attracts 100,000 Aspiring Programmers In 48 Hours | TechCrunch: “Two days ago, Codecademy — a startup that’s looking to bring programming to the masses — launched a nifty initiative called Code Year. It’s pretty straightforward: sign up, and each week you’ll receive some programming lessons in your email inbox.

And apparently, there are a lot of people who want to learn how to code. Code Year just had its 100,000th user sign up — a remarkable milestone given that the site has only been up for 48 hours. And that number continues to grow at a rapid pace.”

We’re using CodeAcademy as the first steps of a trimester long endeavor to make an official iOS and HTML5 app for our school.

I didn’t come up with this idea… they did.

Pretty soon, these girls and their peers who are toting around iPads, iPod Touches, Kindle Fires, iPhones and Android Devices like we toted around Walkmans are going to start demanding more from their web experiences just as we of the Walkman generation demanded more from our music experiences (and we see what happened to the music industry in the course of a decade).

If you’re going to have a viable web business in 10 or 20 years, it’s time to learn how to code beyond some basic PHP or WordPress hooks.

The kids are alright.

Dash and Affiliate Pageviews?

Interesting concept for a company looking to posit itself in the already heated analytics space…

Parse.ly Will Launch Its Pageview-Generating Machine Called “Dash” This Month | TechCrunch: “Dash aims to help publishers increase pageviews by providing insight into what topics are trending and what topics they should write more about or less about, among other things. But most importantly, its predictive analysis engine is able to recommend what topics publishers should cover right now to be on top of future trends. Simply put, it’s a pageview-generating machine.”

Dash sounds like it might have the predictive chops to fill a gap between aggregate analytics programs and more real time programs by focusing on the predictive side of things.

The question will be whether it actually works for niche sites and not just mega Twitter-style trends.

If Dash does work well with niche traffic predictive analysis, it could be a very very useful tool for affiliates.

Keep an eye out.

DreamHost is Down; Affiliate Sites and Hosting

One of the questions I get the most frequently from folks new to affiliate marketing is which host to use for affiliate sites.

There is no one true answer to the question, of course. The answer will vary depending on the person.

However, it is not a decision that you should arrive at quickly or easily. There are many many variables involved in picking a good host and price is just one of them.

For instance, DreamHost is down again (evidently this has been happening frequently judging from the comments):

DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Major Network Outage: “Our admins are currently investigating this matter. This outage is impacting all of our central databases. Which controls nearly every service ( ex. DNS, Panel, WebMail, Customer Websites, etc ). Therefor if you are encountering any type of downtime, it’s likely related to this outage.”

Do your research and due diligence when picking a hosting provider for your affiliate sites. Sure, it’s great to get a site up and going for $10 on a domain name and $5 a month for co-location hosting, but is that really the best provider for you? As always, research research research.

The prices run from $5 to around $25 for entry level hosting and minimal traffic but once you start scaling, things like downtime, versions of PHP offered, ability to add subdomains, mask links etc really become more valuable than a few bucks. And trust me, it’s a pain to move a site once it has a home.

By the way, if you’re wondering, I always suggest the fine folks at MediaTemple and use them for all I do on the web.

I Love TinyLetter

Awesomely Simple TinyLetter Admin Page…

Yesterday, I wrote about the seldom discussed differences between RSS subscribers and email subscribers to websites. It’s an interesting discussion when you ponder what it means to actually engage visitors and create sustaining revenue channels and interactions beyond just a one-time visit.

One tool that I’ve been using on my affiliate sites of late to generate sustainable email lists is TinyLetter.

TinyLetter is a fantastic service that is a product of the awesome MailChimp folks (which is, itself a robust and very competent email subscription platform).

However, I love TinyLetter’s sense of style, ease of use and feeling of mutual respect between subscriber and news list owner. There’s a quirky feeling to it that leads to goodwill (or so I think).

After much testing (I’ll publish that info on the newsletter), I’m even going with TinyLetter for the PayPerTrends Newsletter (linked above or here you go):

PayPerTrends Newsletter by Sam Harrelson: “Get more in-depth information and examples of practical “Job to Be Done” case studies involving the frontiers of performance marketing in mobile and social media once a week or so (soon to be premium feature).”

Feel free to sign up if you’d like to see the walk thru process. This will be a “premium” feature in the near future (something like $5 a month) but will go into much more depth and actual case study type materials than most people are needing or want to read (plus, it is a ton of work and a lot of info on what I provide to/for clients).

Most people in the affiliate industry seem to prefer Aweber for email subscription platforms, but I’ve never liked the look/feel of their product. Plus, the testing I’ve done on my own sites suggest I’m not the only one that is more likely to join a TinyLetter list over its more “robust” competitors. Sometimes, small is indeed beautiful when it comes to conversions.

There’s something about TinyLetter that resonates well with me.

Falling Off a Segway

Good show this week from Lisa and Shawn…

The Great Affiliate Summit West 2012 Preview Podcast: “This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille preview Affiliate Summit West 2012, covering the list of parties, tips for first time attendees, and how to get a free massage in Las Vegas.”

My middle school students are particularly big fans of the infamous Sam-Falling-From-a-Segway video Shawn mentions.

I’m all in favor of the live Cast of Geeks show in Vegas next week (and beyond). Let’s rebrand, though. AffiliateCasters?

RSS is Still Important for Marketers

I love my RSS feeds that I’ve been curating over the last six or so years. I still think that as a delivery medium RSS is part of the future of the web.

However, RSS has always taken a back seat to other ways of capturing and engaging visitors to other tactics such as email. As Scott Jangro wrote in a recent comment here:

All Traffic is Not Good Traffic | Discussion: “But can you do something to capture them as your own? That should be the primary focus on that traffic. Give them something that will get them to give you their email address, or sign up and get involved in a website. The latter is harder than the former.

So regardless of the traffic source, who are these users that are coming by, and what can you do to make them *yours*?”

There’s a mighty good reason that RSS takes a back seat to email or some other “capture” mechanism… RSS is insanely nerdy and grows more so every day/month/year. There was a great hope of people like me who saw RSS as a very viable platform that could transform the way the web delivers content and news to most individuals and we’d all be running around reading our feeds on browsers or our devices to our whims (instead of turning to mediated sources like cable news or heavens forbid network news).

That didn’t happen.

For sure, RSS is alive via platforms like the awesome Flipboard app, which is much more “user friendly” than NetNewsWire or Google Reader will ever be (though much less satisfying if you ask me).

RSS is still very much alive as a pure web medium as well. So why should marketers care about RSS subscriptions?

Because all traffic is not good traffic. The traffic you should be concerned about as a marketer is the highly qualified traffic that has the potential to not only convert into some action but become a part of the actual community that will grow and build a site over the long run (if you care about such things, which you should).

Yes, that can be accomplished via email newsletters and lists. However, email lists and RSS subscribers are almost apples and oranges in terms of comparison when considering how they interact with a site and what type of user community can be built with their help and engagement.

RSS subscribers are by nature a nerdy and dedicated bunch… don’t count them out in your efforts. Their numbers may be small (and growing smaller all the time in your Feedburner etc stats) but their power is mighty as I consistently encounter.

Long Strange Trip #asw12

Speaking of Affiliate Summit, found this trip down memory lane on Scribd (where the Affiliate Summit folks have uploaded a ton of material that you can fish through for hours):

Affiliate Summit 2003 Program http://www.scribd.com/embeds/27091560/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-9a7xf92he412mjpzcqx(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

I tried to get a seat to the first Affiliate Summit since I was in town for AdTech that year, but waited too long and missed out. It’s amazing that the conference is almost 10 years old.

Especially of note is the AdBumb article on page 3.

Why Are There No Affiliate Network Apps?

Thousands of affiliate marketers will be traveling next week on the way to Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit.

We affiliate types are notoriously compulsive about checking our stats on the affiliate and cap networks, on Google and in our various analytics packages (as we should be).

I can check my Google stats, email subscription numbers and analytics numbers all from the comfort of my iPhone (and even make changes as needed). However, there’s no way to easily check CJ, Linkshare, ShareASale etc network stats. Why?

With thousands of affiliates traveling for hours and hours next week, it sure would be nice to be able to pick up an iPhone, iPad (or heavens forbid an Android device or Kindle Fire) and check on our stats with ease.

Yes, you can get to most affiliate interfaces on a smart phone as you would see them in a browser. However, it is 2012 now. Time to app up.

And this, Linkshare, is just janky:

LinkShare Mobile Dashboard Launches: “LinkShare has launched a mobile dashboard (“Mobile Dash”) that allows affiliates to login from a mobile device to find and promote links.”

So, my hope is that the affiliate app space will begin to grow up a little in 2012 beyond this (do a search in the App Store for “affiliate marketing” and you’ll be embarrassed too).

Maybe by Affiliate Summit East later this year, we’ll be able to open up the CJ or Linkshare or ShareASale app on our iPhones and rest our compulsions.

Or, you can use the name AffTrack.

Edit: I was wrong. Vinny O’Hare (aka My Little Vinny) reminded me that AvantLink does indeed have a functional mobile app for its network. Thanks, Vinny and AvantLink! Will look more at your programs now.

Time to Learn to Code

I use MarsEdit more than any other app out there. If you write content for the web and have a Mac, MarsEdit is a must.

Its developer, Daniel Jalkut, has a fantastic post on the topic of programming as the literacy of the 21st century…

Red Sweater Software Blog – Learn to Code: “Literacy isn’t about becoming a Hemingway or a Chabon. It’s about learning the basic tools to get a job done. I think programming — coding — is much the same. You don’t have to be the world’s best programmer to develop a means of expressing yourself, of solving a problem, of making something happen. If you’re lucky, you’ll be a genius, but you start out with the basics.”

That’s why I’m crazy enough to be working with a group of 15 6th-8th grade girls to help them learn how to make an iOS or Android app. Coding is the new literacy.

Brent Simmons, maker of NetNewsWire and overall deep thinker on programming, has launched Code Year. Go and join up here (free, you get a weekly newsletter to help and prod you as you learn programming).

Go and learn.

My Favorite SEO Plugin

I do most of my own SEO but when I have an affiliate site on WordPress (as most of mine are), I like to use the great SEO Ultimate Plugin. There are a few others out there (probably equally as good) but this plugin is my go-to when it comes to quick link masking, 404 detection, deep linking prefs etc.

There’s a new update out that expands on some of the functionality…

SEO Ultimate WordPress SEO Plugin Version 7.2.1 Released: “Link masking has two benefits: First, it lets you replace lengthy affiliate URLs with short, clean, internal URL masks (using 301 redirects, which have no search engine penalty). Second, Link Mask Generator automatically generates robots.txt rules that disallow your masked URLs, effectively neutering the juice-flow of the link, without resorting to the rel nofollow attribute. This combination makes Link Mask Generator a perfect tool for affiliate marketers.”

If you use WordPress, it’s worth a look as a plugin.

Here’s a PDF with all of the new features.

Web Design and Fixed Screen Sizes

If you take seriously the appearance of your affiliate site (as you should… design is how it works), this is a must read thought piece…

State of the web: of apps, devices, and breakpoints – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report: “When I see fragmentation, I remind myself that it is unsustainable by its very nature, and that standards always emerge, whether through community action, market struggle, or some combination of the two. This is a frustrating time to be a web designer, but it’s also the most exciting time in ten years. We are on the edge of something very new. Some of us will get there via all new thinking, and others through a combination of new and classic approaches. Happy New Year, web designers!”

Granted, this debate is not for every affiliate out there but the issue of fixed-design screen sizes and how your site gets presented on a laptop browser compared to an iPad compared to an iPhone compared to an Android device with a near 5 inch screen compared to a Kindle Fire is a very real and tangible aspect of your business that you should be considering.

Why Freemiums Aren’t the Future Path

Interesting piece by Tac Anderson on the concept of Path as an Upstream Social Network (USN below) compared to traditional networks like Twitter and Facebook which he terms Downstream Social Networks (DSN below) and how USN’s could affect the engagement of marketers with lucrative data-rich networks:

What Path Teaches Us About The Future of Social Networks | @NewCommBiz: “Lets assume for a minute that as social networking evolves the social graph is filled with private USN and more open, commercial DSN. And what if most of those USN didn’t allow brands and advertising in? (Most of them will but humor me for a minute.) If marketeers and brands want to reach people inside their private USN, they need to be brought in by the members of those networks. Brands need to create experiences worth talking and sharing. A small example is when I shared my new Star Wars Moleskine I was going to be using on Path. You can see the reactions I got on Path as well as those I got on Instagram. Both of those went to Twitter and received their own reactions there.”

Basically, he ponders what if these Downstream Social Networks could thrive with a fermium model where brands and ads weren’t allowed to participate.

I’m not certain this will ever happen for a couple of reasons.

1) Social networks, unlike apps, don’t necessarily proliferate based on individual user experiences. Freemiums work on iPhone apps or even cloud based services that are more single user in nature. Social networks are, by their nature, commons that we don’t have complete control over and we’re more willing to make compromises on design, ads and privacy (hence Facebook).

2) The data-based nature of social networks is so lucrative that even new networks that are beautifully designed and based on the idea of limits (150 friends only, limited sharing etc) will certainly find more and better funding by relying on brands and marketers to subsidize the costs of running a network.

Path (and Facebook) can and should do all they can to encourage marketers to think above the “All Traffic is Good Traffic” blasting approach that many marketers use to get passive and relatively unqualified (and thereby low quality) traffic to their sites/offers/links and think towards better engagement based on some qualitative value in the exchange.

However, freemiums aren’t in our future for social networking.

This may all sound like it has more to do with brand advertisers than direct or affiliate marketers, but I’d argue affiliate marketing has the most to gain from the idea of interacting in these rich spaces of real human interactions and frictionless sharing.

Last Minute Affiliate Summit Hotels #asw12

If you’re like me, you forget to book things early. I use TripIt and Evernote to keep me organized with travel info (love that you can just forward a travel receipt email to plans@tripit.com and you’re all set), but I always forget to book planes, trains and hotels.

I finally got my flights to and from Vegas for Affiliate Summit all scheduled using Hipmunk on the iPad, which is fantastic and painless last week.

However, I’m still looking for a good hotel room for Affiliate Summit since I waited so long. I might just wait until noon on Saturday the 7th when I fly in now that I’ve found Hotel Tonight…

Hotel Tonight: “Last Minute Deals on Hotels”

Nah, probably not (don’t want to sleep in the desert again). However, next time you get somewhere and need a room (and have an iPhone), this looks like a winner.

Why is Affiliate Marketing Doing Well?

Nice overall piece on the current market position of affiliate marketing in the overall scheme of things and how our industry is poised to continue its growth into 2012…

How 2012’s Rise Of The Affiliate Channel Will Impact The $300B E-Commerce Industry: “There are several factors driving the increased interest in performance marketing. The three biggest drivers are the rise in affiliate deal sites, advances in technology and the overall evolution of affiliate marketing. These influences are prompting strategic online retailers to increase their intellectual and financial investments in the affiliate channel.”

I’d add “mobile” as a driver in that list.

Affiliate marketing is particularly well suited to help merchants and media buyers grow as mobile continues to become a primary mover rather than a secondary channel. Couple that with lackluster returns from social media marketing (due more to poor execution based on 20th century broadcasting techniques rather than required 21st century narrowcasting strategies) and affiliate marketing is shaping up to be the hot sector for online marketing in the coming years.

Free Progress Bars

I’m in the middle of working on an app for a client and came across this post/repository of awesome progress bars that are lightweight and don’t use images…

Josh Sullivan: Css3 progress bars: “I made CSS3 progress bars for a display of data inside localized leaderboards for the new analytics platform at G5.

They are light-weight, requiring no javascript. They look great on iOS devices and they’re incredibly simple to use and customize. No images are used.”

Click over for the images. Impressive and helpful.

Not sure if many of you are doing app development (why aren’t you?) but this is pretty helpful if you want to get around the stock iOS progress bar look.

I love github.

All Traffic is Not Good Traffic

Affiliate Summit published its latest webinar today on the topic of traffic generation. Evan speaks for an hour about how he generates traffic and “fans” organically through search, via social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook, with email and paid search…

10 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website: “Affiliate Summit ran a free webinar featuring Evan Weber, of online marketing agency Experience Advertising, on 10 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website, and it’s now available to watch on demand.”

It’s an interesting video for people new to the area of affiliate marketing and Evan does a good job of showing how to get traffic via tried and true techniques that do increase page views.

However, my reminder to advertisers and publishers I work with (especially folks new to the industry) is that not all traffic is good traffic.

For instance, ping.fm is spam (still waiting for the mud fight, Kim). It’s a fantastic tool if you’re looking to broadcast like you’re Dan Rather, but that’s not what the effective media tactic of 2011 looks like and you’re not CBS.

In Evan’s webinar, he makes great use of tools like ping.fm, a Chrome extension for blasting out links to Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Status.net, Plurk and God knows what else, but most, if not all, of the traffic gained from such blasting will do little to help you conversion numbers and in fact drive the type of dilution that could lead you to make poor choices about ad placements, keyword buys etc.

In other words, this type of traffic generation is great if you’re doing CPM advertising, but CPA and PayPerSale in 2011 requires different strategies based on community growth in the long term.

A much more realistic strategy for effective and sustained traffic and conversions generation is to hyper-focus. Build out the profile of your ideal user. What networks do they use? What things do they search for? What will lead them to your site, make an action on your site and then refer your site to others and come back at least once in the coming three months? What do they look like? Where do they live (don’t be creepy)? What do they wear? What kind of pets do they have? What games do they play? What do they drive? Be obsessive. Sweat the details and do your research.

Take the portfolio of that person you create and work incessantly to sell your story to that person. It’s not easy, but it will pay off. If you get that one person to your site, you’ve made it.

Stop reaching for millions of page views via artificial keyword buys and blasted out social media messages and thousands of indexed pages with forums that no one uses and work to convert that one person that you’ve created.

At least that’s what works for me and why you’re reading this now.

Insync + Sparrow = Crazy Delicious

Holy amazing, Batman:

Insync: A Google Docs-Loving Dropbox Rival: “If you’re the kind of person who uses Google Docs and Dropbox a lot, perhaps for business, as is becoming increasingly popular, then you will be interested to hear that Asian firm Insync has just announced that its cloud-based sharing platform is available for free.”

Multiple Google Docs support (I have one for here, one personal account and one from my school… it gets confusing), robust online/offline support and notification of changes to documents are all selling points for me to use Insync heavily.

Combine Insync with Sparrow for multiple GMail or Google Apps mail accounts and you’ve got all your chocolate and peanut butter in one spot.

If you’re using Google Apps for your affiliate sites (not sure why anyone wouldn’t) and have a personal or different GMail account, Insync + Sparrow is a win-win for managing those multiple Mail and Docs accounts.

Now Insync just needs an iOS app.

What Job Does Your Affiliate Site Do?

When you construct an affiliate site or an affiliate program or look to optimize a site or program, the question of how and why people visiting your site or program is just as important as what they are doing on your site. Both affiliates and advertisers frequently overlook the essential question of what job people are looking to accomplish by searching for your keyword or discovering your site.

On the way to a meeting in Charlotte yesterday, I got to listen to a couple of podcasts I’ve missed. One of those was an episode of The Critical Path and it might have been the most revelatory thing I’ve heard in a long while on this very topic.

In a nutshell, Horace Dediu talks with a guest on the fascinating concept of Jobs To Be Done.

The concept is deceptively simple… people looking to buy a product or use a service (go read the Facebook post linked above) don’t actually buy the product or service as a thing, rather the customer is looking to hire the product or service to accomplish a job for them.

The example of a Snickers bar vs a Milky Way bar in the podcast makes it clear. You should seriously stop what you’re doing and go stream/download this now…

5by5 | The Critical Path #19: The hiring and firing of milkshakes and candy bars: “Horace talks with Bob Moesta, a pioneer of Job To be Done research. We go over the theory and process of understanding what products are really hired to do and ask why this understanding is so hard to come by. In a discussion rich with examples from multiple industries Bob illustrates how marketing, design and engineering are all dancing around the question of how product should be developed. Could the universally accepted compartmentalization of corporate functions be a root cause to product failure?”

Here’s the mp3 or click over to hear the stream (and subscribe to the podcast and the other great shows on the 5by5.tv network that you should be listening to!).

Namecheap Domain Move Update

Yesterday I decided to go with the gestalt and move a few test domains from GoDaddy to Namecheap.

I’m happy to say that at about 9pm last night, I received an email from Namecheap saying the process had been completed (and one from GoDaddy saying goodbye).

In total, it took about 10 hours from start-to-finish, but I’m guessing much of that was due to the Dump GoDaddy Day movement.

All of the name servers were switched over automagically (they point to my host MediaTemple for the samharrelson.com domain) without me having to do anything, which is a big relief.

I’ll be moving PayPerTrends, as well as all of my domains, over to Namecheap this weekend. So, if you see anything goofy or the site has some downtime, you’ll know the hamsters in the back are doing their thing.

Excited.

I’m a nerd.

Rock on.

Facebook Like-Jacking and Need for Digital Literacy

Interesting:

Criminals Used Affiliate Marketing Sites in Majority of Facebook Scams in 2011: The vast majority, or nearly 74 percent, of Facebook attacks in 2011 were designed to lead users to fraudulent marketing affiliate and survey sites, the report found.

Affiliate marketing was a “rich source” of income for scammers, according to Amir Lev, CTO of Commtouch.

First, it’s interesting to me that the writer focuses so much on how easy it is for scammers and “criminals” (a conviction is needed to be a criminal… just saying) to use the medium of what he broadly labels as affiliate marketing. The piece focuses more on survey type deals that were so popular with the “free iPod” craze of 2003-4 in the pre-CANSPAM era.

It’s pretty easy for the legitimate businesses he sources as being defrauded to check their logs and any affiliate manager or OPM worth their salt will catch this kind of scam traffic, especially if they are dealing with the lead based side of things in the CPA and lead gen areas.

The real heart of the piece should be about the need for better digital literacy among users of spaces like Facebook (especially if they are browsing on a Windows machine with IE6 or 7).

Cue Wayne Porter…

“For criminals, it was not enough to just trick users, as criminals need to make sure the attacks spread and continue to trap other people, Commtouch said. They were most likely to trick users into sharing the links almost half the time, but also tricked users into copy-pasting malicious code to trigger a cross-site scripting attack or downloading malware. Rogue applications and “like-jacking”—which employs a malicious script on the page to convert any mouse clicks on the page as a “like” that is also visible to other users—were employed in about a third of the scams.

“In 48 percent of the cases, unwitting users themselves are responsible for distributing the undesirable content by clicking on ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons,” according to Commtouch.”

It’s fascinating to me that many of the conversations Wayne and I were having back in 2008 about a future of social-engineered badware that would find virility through good-willed sharing are coming true in 2011 and even more so into 2012.

At the root of the issue isn’t affiliate marketing or how easy it is to scam businesses. Businesses have failsafes and checks in place to catch these things (ideally). Instead, we need to have more savvy users who realize the implications of sharing or liking a suspect link or article or site.

This sort of manipulation of otherwise trusting, naive or uninformed users of the web will only intensify as more people go on the web with mobiles and tablets in the coming five years.

Bristol!

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Sent from my iPhone

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