Slow Link Building

Is it written into affiliate programs that they should run slow when I go to build links? Is it written in the code somewhere if = jimmy daniels then create links = slow?

Sure seems that way.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing No Comments » February 2009

Gateway Shutting Down Affiliate Program, Online Website Sales

Just got this message through CJ that said Gateway is shutting down their affiliate program and the Gateway.com website will become an educational website. They also give the typical 2 or 3 day notice, as always, affiliate marketers take it because they have to.

Hello Everyone,

Hope you’re doing well!

I regret to inform you that the Gateway program is being shut down. As of July 27th, Gateway.com will be transformed into an educational site and will no longer be a forum for e-commerce.

Please remove all links immeditately in order to avoid product fulfillment issues.

It has been a pleasure working with all of you.

Best,

The Gateway Team

Gotta love the lack of spell checking nowadays.

Affiliate marketers aren’t the only ones who are losing out; all of the online sales reps are losing their jobs too. Gateway will continue to sell their computers at retail outlets, and, I assume on websites like Buy.com, Newegg, Overstock, TigerDirect, etc. This has certainly caused a little uproar on sites like this one TabletPCReview, where many members were hoping to get an updated C-142XL tablet. One rep they talked to said he didn’t think they were continuing the tablet pc’s, while another said they were the leader in the tablet market and she thought it would be crazy to stop selling the line.

I am assuming they will still sell on the big sites like TigerDirect, but it would be good to get an official word from someone at Gateway. It seems like a bad move on Gateway’s part, I much prefer ordering everything online so I don’t have to deal with the sales people.

Thanks again for the short notice.

Added: Some posts about it on Techmeme today:
From Between the Lines In a statement, Mark Hill, Acer’s U.S. general manager said: “We are shifting Gateway’s distribution method to better align with Acer’s successful global strategy, which was built upon an indirect model.”

Larry adds: Bottom line: Don’t go to Gateway.com if you want a system. You’ll find Gateways at outlets like Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Costco, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Wal-Mart.

From Yahoo! Finance This change will dramatically simplify Gateway’s business model and deliver significant cost savings, ultimately resulting in an improved value proposition for consumers.

“We believe that our retail and e-tail partners offer consumers the best, easiest and most effective way to purchase Gateway products,” said Mark Hill, Acer Group U.S. General Manager. “Customers can rest assured that they will continue to get the award-winning products and outstanding technical support they’ve come to expect from Gateway for the last 23 years.”

Frpm PC World The change has resulted in some staff cuts, said Lisa Emard, a Gateway spokeswoman. “These reductions have been happening in small waves as the company has methodically evaluated each department and function,” she said.

The change could help Gateway better compete with rivals Hewlett-Packard and Dell, said David Daoud, research manager at IDC. Also, since the indirect model has worked well for Acer, it may be hoping that focusing on the same model can help boost Gateway sales.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Branding Mistakes, HP Computers, Layoffs No Comments » July 2008

Webmaster Stuff

Best SES Session - Are Paid Links Evil? We’re only half-way through SES San Jose but I think we’ve already seen the best panel discussion of the event.

“Are Paid Links Evil” saw Matt Cutts go head to head with Greg Boser, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio.

The room was packed with marketers all hoping the session would live up to the hype of its carefully crafted title - “session bait” anyone?

Google announces a simple new way to embed Google Maps Starting today, Google Maps users can add a map to their website or blog just by copying & pasting a snippet of HTML. This new functionality enables Google Maps users to share and disseminate geographic information in the same way that YouTube users share videos. Bloggers and webmasters no longer need an API key or knowledge of Java Script to put a Google Map on their website or blog.

Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads.

Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network—connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We’re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers.

Our New Webmaster Portal and an Invitation to the Private Beta Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO.

And Google is probably going to cost us more money, Improved top ad placement formula now in effect Two weeks ago, we posted about an upcoming improvement to the formula used to determine which ads are placed in the top spots above Google search results. The change offers advertisers more control over when their ads achieve top placement, while also increasing the quality of our ad results for users. Today, we wanted to let you know that the improved formula is now in effect.

Ya, but improved for who?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Contextual Advertising, Google, Linking Strategies, MSN, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Webmasters No Comments » August 2007

Dell Homes Moves to CJ, Disses Linkshare

Just got this email from the Dell Home program on Linkshare, I get the feeling Linkshare won’t be liking how they worded it. Too bad their program sucks, gotta use em though cause they are one of the top dogs.

Dear Affiliate,

Effective August 29, 2007, 12am CST the Dell Home Affiliate Program will be managed exclusively through the Commission Junction Network. We will no longer be compensating affiliates for any sales submitted through the LinkShare platform after this time. Please switch out all Dell Home links with Commission Junction code as soon as possible to ensure proper compensation.

We are excited about the new opportunities joining Commission Junction will bring our publishers and look forward to an even more successful relationship with our affiliates.

With this move, we will be able to provide you with a better affiliate experience:

Commission Junction’s sophisticated web-based interface allows for better management of campaigns by providing a higher level of real-time reporting previously unavailable on our former platform.

While still providing many of the link types available with LinkShare (banners, text links, Product Catalog), Commission Junction offers more flexibility and tools than before.

With all these new features at your disposal, you can expand campaigns and earn more in Dell Home commissions!

If you currently DO NOT have an active publisher account with Commission Junction

· You can apply to the program by using this link which will simultaneously create a Commission Junction Publisher account and apply you to the Dell Home Affiliate Program: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2125808

· To get started, check your email for your username and password. Once in your new account, go to the Get Links>By Relationship>My Advertisers tab and you will already be applied to the Dell Home program.

· If you have questions about setting up your account, you can contact CJ Client Support at 1.800.761.1072.

If you are already a Commission Junction Publisher

· You can sign up for the Dell Home Program directly through the Commission Junction Member’s Area: https://members.cj.com/member/publisher/advertiserdirect.do?advertiserid=2125808 or by logging into your account and typing in “Dell Home” in the Advertiser Search Bar.

· Once you log in, you will automatically be directed to our Advertiser Detail Page, all you have to do is click on “Apply To Program” and you should receive confirmation almost immediately.

* As one of our dedicated LinkShare affiliates, your application will be fast tracked for approval during this time, so that you can begin to adjust your promotions accordingly and earn commissions right away!

After August 29, 2007 the program will be open to the entire Commission Junction Network, so if you do not receive an approval from your application within a reasonable amount of time, please contact us directly (dellhomeaffiliates@cj.com).

We have enjoyed our relationship with you through the LinkShare network and hope to continue our partnership as we migrate over to the Commission Junction Marketplace! At any time, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at dellhomeaffiliates@cj.com.

All the best,

Dell Home Affiliate Marketing Team

dellhomeaffiliates@cj.com

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing 2 Comments » August 2007

UK Internet Advertising Bureau Launches First Search Marketing Best Practice Charter

The Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK and the Direct Marketing Association are launching the first search marketing charter to establish best practices throughout the industry. Each search marketing company must meet four requirements to allow them to promote themselves on their websites and company literature.

The Internet Advertising Bureau – the trade association for internet marketing – and the Direct Marketing Association are launching the first search marketing charter to establish best practice throughout the industry. The charter includes four key requirements for search marketing companies in the UK.

This charter represents an important first step in the establishment of search marketing best practice in the UK. - Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau.

This is the first time industry bodies have collaborated on search standards in the UK. The charter is a product of the IAB search council and the DMA’s continued efforts to educate marketers about search marketing – currently worth 58% of all online advertising expenditure in the UK – and to reinforce advertiser and agency confidence in the medium. Source: Internet Advertising Bureau launches first search marketing best practice charter

The most interesting part of this announcement is the last paragraph that says,

“David White, chair of the IAB Search Council and Managing Director of search marketing company Weboptimser said: “We created the charter to help clients identify reliable suppliers who know, understand and demonstrate best practice within this fast moving industry. We have further plans for the charter that will include affiliate marketers and detail advanced search engine marketing techniques.”

So, they will be including affiliate marketers in future versions, should be interesting, too bad they are just recommended best practices and not required. Here are the four criteria, with more to be added before the end of the year.

• They must have at least two employees dedicated to search marketing
• They must have search engine accreditation (from Google or Microsoft with more to follow) and have received official search engine optimization (SEO) training as relevant
• The company must have been trading for 6 months
• The company must be a member of either IAB UK, IAB Europe, DMA or Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) or the Association of Business to Business Agencies (ABBA).

Download the document here.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Search Engines 1 Comment » August 2007

Goldencan Performance

I had several pages recently pop back into Google after a long sabbatical, I didn’t think they would remain for very long, so I added some Goldencan stores and forgot about them. Well, they have remained in for a month or so now, so, one would think I would’ve gotten some sales by now, they are all using the same merchant, all the search terms are similar, cheap this, discount that, etc. Well, got a big goose egg so far, and I believe part of the problem is Goldencan is so slow, every time I hit those pages it takes forever to come up, today, it took over a minute for some pages. Who waits a minute before anything starts showing on the screen? Nobody. The only other things on those pages are some Valueclick banners and some adsense code, same code I am using on the rest of my site, and there are no other slowdowns that I have seen. So, Goodbye Goldencan, I like the promise of never having to update those pages, but what good is it if it takes forever to come up, no one is going to hang around long enough to see what shows up, let alone click on anything. I’d be better off to hand code the pages and let them sit, even if the ads get old and land on products that are out of stock, at least they can click on something.

Anyone else noticed any problems with Goldencan, it can’t just be me?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Goldencan 3 Comments » July 2007

How Serious is Affiliate Marketing?

I’ve had this post sitting here for a LONG time, as you can see this post is numbered #9, and what do I do, I completely rewrite it. I just finished reading this blog entry Corruption in Affiliate Marketing by Fraser, sorry, I couldn’t find your last name anywhere Fraser, drop a comment and I will add it. This post talks about brand name bidding and he wonders what lengths affiliates would go to be able to bid on big brand names, would they bribe affiliate managers, would affiliate managers take the bribes etc.. Note: It’s Fraser Edwards. (Thanks Scott!)

What would an affiliate do to try to gain approval to bid on the big brands?

Would an account manager take a bribe when it comes down to deciding who gets these rights to cash in on the brand name?

If you have any information on anything like this then please leave a comment or get in touch as I think it’s important to make sure that the playing field remains level for everyone.

I have some bad news for you Fraser, there is no level playing field in affiliate marketing, never has been, never will be. Is this fair? No it’s not. Is this the only industry things like this happen in? Nope. Everything in affiliate marketing, boils down to who you know and in lots of circumstances, where you work.

We all know many people who worked for companies that are now big names in affiliate marketing, people who worked for companies like Overture, Commission Junction, big Merchants, Performics, many of which left with insider info including top keywords, best means of promotion, the list goes on and on. Many are known, while even more are not known by the affiliate marketing public. This is part of the reason most networks now don’t allow you to work there and have affiliate sites promoting their merchants.

Networks have allowed and even promoted adware, spyware because of the sheer numbers of sales they can attach their affiliate id’s too, I say attach, because, for the most part, some other webmaster did the selling, the programs just get the close and last affiliate id attached to it. For the most part, networks are allowing less program interference, removing the darker programs and allowing the ones in who actually promote them the way they are allowed, for the most part. I went to a couple Merchants at Befree in 2004 because there was recorded evidence of them overwriting my affiliate links. Both merchants said they would talk to Befree about it, both merchants came back and told me that Befree said they didn’t see anything wrong, so there must be nothing wrong. Neither merchant has received any promotion from me other than just adding a link to them because it is expected. I sold 100,000 in computers for one of them that month and I never looked back, of course the adware program had much higher numbers than that, so they are right by default. Maybe if I had better contacts with Befree at the time, or even bigger numbers I might have got some satisfaction, but I would have to be a serious player to get any real consideration. Note: I was going to post the video that was posted on abestweb but I can’t find it.

Anyone remember when KBToys and eToys went “bankrupt” and stiffed their affiliates? I got nailed for over $3,000 dollars, and CJ’s basic was response was, oh well, nothing we can do. I talked to a high profile affiliate, Connie Berg of FlamingoWorld.com, and she got her money, either because she had a good contact or she was driving some serious sales to them and they wanted to make sure she joined their Linkshare program. I have been invited many times and I always reply to them and say, sure, if I get the money that was owed to me, hehe, maybe someday, but I doubt it.

My advice to anyone in affiliate marketing, talk to your network reps, talk to your affiliate managers, if you are driving sales they will know who you are anyway, or at least which site is yours, worst case, you won’t get a bigger percentage or any special consideration, best case, you get a big raise, special considerations, your own coupons, the sky could be the limit. Heck, maybe they will let you bid on their brand name even, but you won’t get anything special if you don’t ask. Name the last time you started doing some serious sales for a program that was managed by a network employee and you get a reward for it without asking? Never happened to me, the only ones who do are ones who are trying to build up a program quickly and want an extra boost, or they want you to promote another program, but these are usually OPM’s, not network employees. Always introduce yourselves and always ask for a raise, bottom line.

So, how serious is affiliate marketing? It’s very serious, but no one will take you seriously if you don’t talk to them, get your name out and ask for what you deserve.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing 3 Comments » February 2007

AOL Releases Searches From 650,000 Users

Remember the big hubbub of the Government trying to get search data from Google and Microsoft last year? Well, apparently no one at AOL does, they just released search data from 650,000 users, they removed the AOL username, but just changed it to a random id number, so all the data is still collected by user, and apparently, it includes lots of stuff that lots of people would be embarrassed by, or jailed over. According to this blog, it includes user searches for terms like “how to kill your wife”, “how to kill a wife”, “wife killer”, “pictures of dead people”, “decapitated photos” and many more. I wonder what that guy is up to? Hopefully, someone can check him out.

So, what does this mean? It wont be good for those users, I’m sure. Even though AOL pulled the research page, and the data, thanks to this wonderful thing called the internet, the data is still available, and I’m downloading it now. This will certainly help some affiliate marketers out with some search term data they can use, but who else could benefit? Combine vanity searches, where people search for their own name to see what is out there, with social security info and you can have identity theft, combine it with some porn searches and you could end up with some big embarrassments for some people, combine it with drugs or other types of searches and people could end up in jail, maybe, I don’t know, but I can’t believe AOL would release this data like this without talking it over.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch says,

The utter stupidity of this is staggering. AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the ability to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.

The web page from Aol research, http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months, that is being referenced by so many blogs is gone, but below is the text of the page from the Google cache.

500k User Queries Sampled Over 3 Months

This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~500k users over three months. Where the data is sorted by an anonimized user id:

‘The data set includes {UserID, Query, QueryTime, ClickedRank, DestinationDomainUrl}.

The goal of this collection is to provide a real query log based on users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other type of search research.

The graph below shows that not all users are equal in terms of usage.

Basic Collection Statistics
Dates:
01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006

Normalized queries:
19,076,613 queries total
10,865,119 unique (normalized) queries
658,086 unique user ID’s

Data View
Below we rank domains by the probability of click-through and ratio of unique queries. Pick a domain and see some of the top queries that users searched for to see that domain.

If you have other views or insights from the data add it to our U500k community.

We have slit the data into 10 randomly assigned groups of users. This will facilitate experimentation on smaller sets of data, as well as consistent training/testing splits across experiments. For example, in our own experiments we have used 8 groups of users’ data for training and 1 group for testing. We repeat our experiments 10 times for cross-validation with a “leave one out” approach. I suggest that if people are not interested in cross validation, they should train on 6 groups and test on 3, again leaving one out (e.g. train on groups 1-6, test on groups 8-10). The assignment of groups is truly random so any similar arrangement is valid. However, if we all use the same splits we can all compare data easily.

Please reference the following publication when using this collection:

G. Pass, A. Chowdhury, C. Torgeson, “A Picture of Search”, The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Hong Kong, June, 2006.

This collection is distributed for non-commercial research use only. Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

CAVEAT EMPTOR — SEXUALLY EXPLICIT DATA! Please be aware that these queries are not filtered to remove any content. Pornography is prevalent on the Web and unfiltered search engine logs contain queries by users who are looking for pornographic material. There are queries in this collection that use SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. This collection of data is intended for use by mature adults who are not easily offended by the use of pornographic search terms. If you are offended by sexually explicit language you should not read through this data. Also be aware that in some states it may be illegal to expose a minor to this data. Please understand that the data represents REAL WORLD USERS, un-edited and randomly sampled, and that AOL is not the author of this data.

500k User Test Collection (tar gzipped) (79 downloads)
Please comment on this collection, add references to works using it or suggest improvements that will help other researchers. Tell us about your experiences on this collection at U500k or post shorter comments here.

What were they thinking? I bet the data is already in use in many places and people will be feeling the repercussions from this for a long time.

Zoli’s Blog is calling for a boycott of AOL.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Affiliate Marketing, Google, Research, Search Engines 9 Comments » August 2006

Google Coupons Page for Google Checkout

Just read this post by Shmuly Tennenhaus from Revenews.com, and he posted something that is going to be big. He just found a Google Coupons page that is already ranking for many coupon searches! This page looks like your typical coupon page, except their are no affiliate link, but you have featured merchants at the top and others farther down. He mentions the search jockey coupon code, the Google page is already on the first page, second page for buy.com coupons, on the first page for buy.com coupon codes, and many others that I just tried really quick. AND, I searched for online shopping, and guess who is the only sponsored link above the serps? Why it’s Google Checkout, click the link to see a little screenshot. And upon clicking the sponsored link, I landed on a page with a link to Places to shop which lands, you guessed it, on the Google coupon page.

I searched for coupon codes and there they are on the third page! Pretty good rankings for such a new page. I bet it is already getting PLENTY of traffic. Not a huge number of merchants on there yet, but wonder how many will sign up now? How many will see this page climbing the ranks for stores that are listed and decide they want get part of that traffic? This page contains many coupon terms that are obviously for google only, and they are all for $10 off of an order over $20! A coupon for 50% off from all of the merchants on this page in the second section.

Is this the end for coupon sites, no, but I think it’s a nice left jab. What about affiliate marketing? Google has been pushing affiliate pages out for a long time, I haven’t found any affiliate links on this page, but it would be very easy for them to be paid commissions from this page, would be nice if some of these merchants would check in to let us know if it is just straight traffic, or does Google get a piece of the pie.

I’m sure I will be adding more to this entry, as I am still checking this stuff out.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Google, Search Engines 3 Comments » July 2006

ValueClick Takes on Zango, 180solutions, as an Advertiser

Was just reading Wayne Porter’s Summit Insight: Good Example Mr. Storm & Bad Example Mr. Zango where he congratulates Tim Storm for winning the Legends award, and he takes Zango to task for more of their “bad affiliates” bull crap.

The two sides — adware provider and security researcher — couldn’t be farther apart, and Zango’s Stratz made it sound as if that would always be the case.

“We know where Boyd and others like him stand, and they know where we stand,” Stratz said.

Yep I am one of the “others like him” and I am glad they know where I stand. Rule of thumb- Don’t stand on fault lines brother.

Yes we do, we stand on the side of the fence that says, treat us as you would want to be treated, and they are on the side that says We want all the money. It’s amazing the spin and bullshit that comes from 180Solutions, it’s never their fault, always an affiliate that others have to find and point out for them, I guess checking to see how their affiliates actually promote them is to much work.

Anyway, getting off track, it appears the parent company of CJ, Valueclick, has taken on Zango as an advertiser, so if you were a publisher for FastClick or Valueclick you can now thank them for paying you to install adware. That’s right, they show you banners containing amazing videos or car crashes, people falling etc, and it only costs you your computers well being. CJ had already kicked Zango to the curb, but that was when it was called 180Solutions, which in internet speak means “stab you in the back”, but I guess since Zango isn’t as familiar to most people they are trying to slip them in under our noses. This is ridiculous, wonder what kind of response I will get from Valueclick when I ask them what is up?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Spyware, Zango No Comments » July 2006

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