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

Chikita Blog Bash 30 Days of Blogging

30 days of blogging from thirty different expert bloggers, including Chris Pirillo, someone from Gizmodo, some from problogger, someone from the gadgeteer, and many more, 26 more as a matter of fact.

Thirty blogging gurus will be taking over the Chitika Blog to take you into their world of blogging. All brought together in one place to give you the ultimate Expert Month of Blogging experience!

You will get to enjoy tips and explore insights about a variety of unique and interesting topics like, “Dare to be Odd” and “Shopping and Blogging: How to make the marriage work”. Source: April, 2007: Month of Expert Blogging

Here are a couple bits of wisdom I have always found to be true from Chris Pirillo, who is kicking it off today. Good Read.

3. Ignore the echo chamber - once everybody starts talking about it, you’ve already missed your chance for being an early adopter.

4. Stay up late - you’ll get more work done after hours than you ever will during the middle of the day. Source: Ten Secrets of an Earlier Adopter Tech Entrepreneur

This could be pretty good, I am listing the RSS feed below, it will update as they are posted, I think it checks every six hours or so.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, Online Marketing 1 Comment » April 2007

MyBlogLog Bans ShoeMoney

Yo, Money, it’s the shoes! Boy if there was ever a better nickname for an affiliate marketer than ShoeMoney, then I don’t know what it is.

Jeremy Schoemaker is a popular affiliate marketer who was recently very supportive of MyBlogLog, he actually challenged Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame to a contest to see who could get the most members, Andy giving away a Zune, Shoe, pimping his cute new assistant Nicole. Jeremy Zawodny actually had the nerve to call Andy a spammer because of it, and later changed it to say he messed up and apologized.

Now it appears that MyBlogLog has banned ShoeMoney from their site, as he is getting 403(Forbidden) errors on any page he visits. The reason? He showed everyone a little hack to allow them to browse websites as other users. It was nothing more than taking the unique id for each bloglog user and putting it in your cookies.txt file, but they ban a popular blogger like Jeremy, one who has almost 900 users and probably introduced many more to the site. The smart move would’ve been to fix it, which they did, and post a note on their blog. Banning a user seems pretty childish to me. Especially since it was their cookie that was not secure to start with. Andy is boycotting MyBlogLog, and others have stated they will as well, so this definitely seems like a bad move for them, this following large sites removing the code because of speed issues, such as Techcrunch.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Online Marketing, TechCrunch No Comments » February 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

Another Good Reason to Shop Online

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Funny, Online Marketing No Comments » January 2007

Yahoo and Oemji.com, A Match Made in Heaven?

Lot of stuff showing up recently about click fraud, online partnerships and whose watching the store, so this one should come as no surprise, Doing Business With A Controversial Partner part of the big click fraud story on Businessweek titled Click Fraud: The dark side of online advertising which I talked about here.

Yahoo turns ads over to a company associated with suspicious clicks, inflated bills, and “rogue” software. The relationship between Yahoo! and an obscure Web site called Oemji.com illustrates why a growing number of companies are worried about where their online ads are turning up and who’s actually clicking on them.

Yahoo recycles ads to Oemji even though several leading Internet security firms claim the site’s owner also distributes software that can deceive and annoy computer users. Yahoo’s own correspondence with Oemji’s parent, Oemtec Ltd., confirms that the online giant knows about the controversy. Yet Yahoo continues to send ads to Oemji that advertisers and online experts allege result in dubious clicks and inflated bills.

Questions about Oemji have arisen elsewhere. Computer security firms Sunbelt Software Inc. and Aladdin Knowledge Systems Inc. have posted consumer warnings, calling Oemji Bar a “browser hijacker,” meaning software that can replace unwary PC users’ search engines without permission, sometimes as they download other software from Oemtec.

Four other security firms, including giant Symantec Corp. (SYMC ), have issued alerts about a different Oemtec product called SpySpotter. Available until last month at spyspotter.com, this program is supposed to clean computers of spyware — programs that can track users’ Web surfing and send them pop-up ads. But Symantec and the others say SpySpotter is actually a “security risk” or “rogue” product, because it can install itself without permission and send exaggerated spyware warnings to entice PC users to sign up for a $29.95 annual subscription. “SpySpotter for a very long time has had a bad history of being force-installed or stealth-installed on people’s PCs,” says Eric L. Howes, who heads research on pernicious programs at Clear-water (Fla.)-based Sunbelt Software.

This is why advertisers need to demand accountability from advertising firms like Google and Yahoo, they want to keep all of their information a secret and tell you click fraud is no problem, nothing to see here, move along. They run their little reports and just give everyone the basics, and act like we should all be happy, but with online advertising pulling in billions and billions of dollars, their word is just not enough.

Yahoo and Google ads end up on to many websites that are just crap and there just to get people to click on links, and lots of people will either hit the back buttons, or they will click on something just to get away from some of these pages. Not to mention all of the click fraud scams going on with paid to read clubs, etc, online advertising can make you lots of money, but it can also cost you lots of money if you aren’t careful. Always check your return on investment and test campaigns before you start marketing “big time”. And a good suggestion is to just let your ads run on the search engines network and not the content network where most of the crap and the terrible ROI comes from, if you are going to let your ads run on the content network, then you should price your clicks CHEAP!

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Click Fraud, Contextual Advertising, Google, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo No Comments » September 2006

The Dark Side of Online Advertising

Another big click fraud report came out today, Businessweek Click Fraud The dark side of online advertising. It hits home with a lot of people because they have the same experiences with Google, if Google wasn’t so secretive about how they combat it, people might not be so put off by them when they say its not happening. I myself had an issue with some form of click fraud, whether intentional or not, a former porn website ended up as a parking page at Godaddy and was sending me clicks for such things as access your pc from anywhere, remote access, etc. About 3 or 4 hundred clicks total if I remember right, not one conversion, not one sale, I bet those people didn’t stay longer than a second, but the fact that it was a former porn site did not matter, as they said the clicks were targeted because they clicked on the adds. Sure, I can see why now, it was part of some scheme, but because I don’t spend that much on Google Adwords, I noticed it real quick and added that site to the blocked list, and eventually, took myself out of the content network entirely, because most of it doesn’t convert at all.

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising. He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann’s faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S. Fleischmann, who has an economics degree from Yale University and an MBA from Wharton, has used specially designed software to discover that the MostChoice ads being clicked from distant shores had appeared not on pages of Google or Yahoo but on curious Web sites with names like insurance1472.com and insurance060.com. He smelled a swindle, and he calculates it has cost his business more than $100,000 since 2003.

It goes on to say that most consultants and experts think the range is 10 to 15% of all clicks are fraudulent and that totals to about 1 billion dollars a year in click fraud. Say that out loud, Yahoo and Google are getting half of that, so 500 million a year would be a decent sized loss if they blocked all click fraud, a reason some people think they don’t do as much as they can against it. Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars worth of advertising money that used to be purchased in newspapers and television, and the reason for a lot of it is that all these clicks are easily tracked and can be attributed some worth. But with more money comes more con artists and apparently a lot more scams.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to $29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc. About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to “impressions,” or how many people view them. Yahoo executives warned on Sept. 19 that weak ad spending by auto and financial-services companies would hurt its third-quarter revenue. Share prices of Yahoo and Google tumbled on the news.

With the advent of paid to read programs, there are thousands and thousands of people clicking on ads to make money, as a form of revenue sharing, the owner gets the users to click the ads and he shares a small percentage with them. People from Kentucky to China all talk about making money by clicking these ads, from $25 to several thousand dollars a month, and this is cash they wouldn’t be getting if Google and Yahoo blocked them, money Google and Yahoo would not get either.

“It’s not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet,” says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months. Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was “way too easy,” he adds. Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. “Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to stop fraud], it’s not having much of an effect,” he says.

But big advertisers and small businesses can’t get nearly as much traffic without Google and Yahoo, which is part of the reason it goes on, if everyone would quit advertising with them until they fixed it, well they would fix it fast, but that is not going to happen as they would lose sales to their competitors and others.

In June, researcher Outsell Inc. released a blind survey of 407 advertisers, 37% of which said they had reduced or were planning to reduce their pay-per-click budgets because of fraud concerns. “The click fraud and bad sites are driving people away,” says Fleischmann. He’s trimming his online ad budget by 15% this year.

Google and Yahoo insist there’s no reason to fret. They say they use sophisticated algorithms and intelligence from advertisers to identify the vast majority of fake clicks. But the big search engines won’t disclose the specifics of their methods, saying illicit clickers would exploit the information.

Nothing to see here they say, nothing to see.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Click Fraud, Contextual Advertising, Google, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo 2 Comments » September 2006

MSN Invites Advertisers to Test ContentAds

Looks like Microsoft is ramping up their advertising efforts, inviting advertisers to test their ContentAds system, which is supposed to begin this fall. Hopefully, as Jen says, this will end up running on non Microsoft sites as well, much like Google Adsense and Yahoo’s offering.

The email invited advertisers received mentioned the various MSN properties than contextually targeted ContentAds would appear on, such as MSN Real Estate and MSN Money, as well as others linked from the main MSN portal. However, it was key noticing the exact text (emphasis mine in the following) and what it means for publishers.

Content Ads is Microsoft’s next product that allows advertisers to place content-targeted, text-based advertisements primarily on Microsoft-owned properties including MSN Money, Real Estate, and many others within the www.msn.com portal.

Always good to get new players capable of sending traffic, even if you have to pay for it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: ContentAds, Contextual Advertising, Google, MSN, Microsoft, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Yahoo No Comments » August 2006

Big Social Network Advertising Deals

Social networks continue to do ad deals to try to make some of the money that everyone seems to think they are worth. Google and MySpace just did a close to billion dollar deal and now Facebook and MSN are inking a deal that will put banners and text links on Facebook pages. Of course the Google and MySpace deal put’s actual money in the pocket or Rupert Murdock while Google could be doing the deal just to get more exposure to and more people using their search engine. Here is the press release from Microsoft.

Microsoft Corp. has struck a deal to provide advertising for social networking site Facebook, in one of the first high-profile agreements for the software maker’s online advertising platform.

Under the deal announced late Tuesday, Microsoft will sell and provide banner ads and sponsored links for Facebook using the adCenter online advertising platform and other in-house technology and services.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. It is expected to run through mid-2009. Source: Yahoo.

I am assuming Microsoft is planning on loosing money as well, as everyone that I know who has advertised on MySpace has lost money, and there is no reason to think the Facebook site will be any different, people aren’t there to shop, they are there because their friends are there. Plus, you know some advertisers will be reluctant to advertise knowing there could be some edgy content next to their ad, especially with stories such as this one involving a banner ad infecting a million computers, Banner Ad on MySpace Infects Over 1 Million Computers and this one involving the adware programs from Zango being pimped on MySpace users, Would you kindly shut your noise-hole?.

Techcrunch says this is notable news because Google wasn’t involved,

This news is most notable because the partner that Facebook chose isn’t Google.

Google is generally thought to generate more revenue per page than either Yahoo or Microsoft due to their method of choosing which ads go on top. While Yahoo places the highest bidding ad on top, Google also takes into account the click through rate on individual ads in deciding which go on top. This seemingly simple feature increases revenue substantially, and along with Google’s superior search product is the single biggest factor in Google’s financial success to date. Yahoo, it is worth noting, is developing a similar system, called Panama, which is rumored to be launching later this year.

I really don’t think targeting will matter as much for the same reasons, people aren’t looking to buy something, unless they landed on a page while searching for something from a search engine or another site, and while the page views on these sites are unreal, click thru’s on ads aren’t very good, so, no matter how you slice it, ROI will always be low to non-existent, and that means the ad spots will be worth less and less as time goes on and advertisers spend less money. But, the thing this deal has over the MySpace deal, Facebook has 10 million college age members, while MySpace has 100 million high school age members, these college kids will have more money and more need for “stuff” if they are on their own, so, this might be a better deal for Microsoft.

Microsoft could also be thinking of using this as a test bed in that they can develop new targeting methods for these users which they could use elsewhere. Definitely an interesting deal, just wish we could see the financials involved.

Earlier this month, Google struck a deal with News Corp.’s MySpace.com, the top social-networking site, to pay at least $900 million in shared advertising revenue and become the online hangout’s exclusive search provider. Under the multiyear deal, Fox Interactive Media will add Google search boxes to MySpace and other sites. Google also get first rights to sell any display ads Fox doesn’t sell directly.

About Facebook: Founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook helps people better understand the world around them by developing technologies that facilitate the spread of information through social networks. The site has over 9 million registered users in over 40,000 geographic, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks, and according to ComScore’s MediaMetrix report, Facebook ranks as the seventh-most trafficked site in the United States. Facebook is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

YouTube also just announced a big deal Tuesday involving branded commercial channels, with Paris Hilton being the first, using this to promote her new album. It’s Hot. (Note: This is a joke, her big saying, I think she’s a skank, but she’s one hell of a promoter.) This is from Techcrunch,

YouTube will unveil a number of custom branded commercial channels tomorrow in its latest move to monetize the site. The bizarre cultural icon Paris Hilton is already highlighted on the front page of the site with her own YouTube channel, to correspond with the release of her debut musical album on Tuesday. Fox has paid an undisclosed sum to advertise its TV show Prison Break on the YouTube channel of Hilton, whose album is produced by Warner Brothers. YouTube reportedly pays more than $1 million each month in bandwidth costs and some people have been concerned that it would be a challenge to turn its huge traffic into money. Thus Paris Hilton to the rescue.

Well, I think this will have the same problems as the other deals, unless they can make the same kind of videos as the ones offered on YouTube, i.e. containing half naked chicks and stupid stunts or jokes. I still think the best way for them to monetize YouTube would be to insert video ads in front of each video, that way everyone has to see it, or at least play it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Facebook, Google, Linking Strategies, MSN, MySpace, Online Marketing, Social Networks, Web 2.0 1 Comment » August 2006

Next Up at Google, Local Coupons

Note: If you are looking for online coupons, then try out a coupon site like Latest Coupons.

I’m beginning to believe that Google wants to be synonymous with Internet, Google Videos, Google Maps, Google News, Google Talk, Google Coupons, everywhere you turn there they are with their fingers in the pie. Now, they are going to start promoting printable coupons using the Google Maps service. How will it work? A business, even one without a web site, will be able to create a coupon, upload that info, including pictures, and Google will display a link to those coupons whenever that business name is shown in the results. Users will be able to print out the coupons and then take them to use at the business. This sounds like a great feature to users, and I will definitely be testing it out locally, to see if anyone is using the service.

More broadly, Mr. Rao said Google’s objective was to encourage local entrepreneurs to start using the Internet to promote their businesses, something that other Internet companies have found difficult. A dry cleaner or pizza shop can create a coupon, he said, without going through the trouble of making its own Web page.

“The big picture here is that to make local search really work you need massive participation by really relevant local businesses,” he said. ““It’s hard enough getting small businesses online. It doesn’t make sense to put up a lot of roadblocks.”

Greg Sterling, an analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said that among the challenges for Google’s plan was that the company might not be able to attract many coupons given its reluctance to spend money to market its services to business owners. Source: NYTimes

This gives me an idea for a side business. I’ll be checking back in later to revisit this I’m sure.

Added: Techcrunch brings up a fantastic idea, one I’m sure Google has already thought of,

Apparently users will print the coupons on paper. It would be nice if there was a mobile tie in like Cellfire offers. The primary problem with Cellfire is the relatively limited coupons available, presumably this won’t be an issue with Google. An Adsense tie in appears to be the next move on the way, with ads being sold that point to coupons. All of these are very logical ways for Google to leverage Google Local, almost predictable. I guess when you’re the market leader you don’t have to make what you do too exciting, it just has to keep on working.

If they could tie it all in, say a user searches for pizza on his cell phone, numbers pop up to local pizza joints with links to coupons the user could just show at the restaurant. Win-win for everybody.

From the Google Local Business Center page,

Add Coupons to Your Google Maps Listing - Free!

Let Google users print your coupons and bring them to your business. Coupons will appear alongside your business listing on Google Maps.

A new way to attract customers. Adding coupons to your listing in Google Maps will bring new customers to your business. The better savings you offer, the more customers you’ll gain.

It’s free and it only takes a few minutes. Just enter a few lines of text for your coupon, set an expiration date, and tell us which of your locations accept the coupon. Users will start seeing your coupons within a few hours.

Added: A website called Mine Your Own Business has already setup one and goes throught the procedure here.

Every day millions of people search Google Maps. The great equalizer is the fact that your map pin is exactly the same size as everyone else’s.

Coupons are a very effective form of advertising, especially when a consumer has searched for your type of business. If the search returns several businesses, your coupon might just be the tie-breaker.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Coupons, Google, Online Marketing No Comments » August 2006

« Previous Entries