Make Money Online

In a previous post I discussed how I thought Twitter was a good tool for businesses.

It turns out that I was underestimating the enterprising drive of Twitter and now Foursquare users. In June of 2009, there was much talk about how a Twitter user suspected his tweets lead to a robbery of his house. Such robberies are possible since the user’s home address is still publicly available via the domain registration of one of his web sites.

I often wondered when (not if) someone one would create a service to highlight the risky behavior of announcing that you weren’t at home. Fast forward to February 2010, and someone finally did it. PleaseRobMe.com is live. The site blatantly looks like a satire, and the creators explain that they made the site to point out the folly of people’s actions. Unfortunately, the information on the site appears legit (you can search Foursquare and Twitter to see the source of the updates), showing people broadcasting that they are away from home. Finding home addresses are not so difficult to find: simply try this search to get a list of people’s addresses, and then you simply need to watch people’s status.

While the Twitter user mentioned in the start of this post has a business, the information people are revealing create the wrong kinds of opportunities. Making it easy for criminals to find and rob you is not the fault of the service, but it does reveal that common sense doesn’t keep up with the new social media technology.

So I end this post with a thought. What are the business model opportunities here?

a) Businesses marketing on Twitter and Foursquare announcing special hours and and ‘on-the-road’ promotions?
b) Businesses offering to catch and correct users who self-reveal risky information?
c) Criminals who are looking for an easier time casing homes?
d) Writers who point out risky behaviors?
e) Other

Please comment, especially if you are one of those who likes to reveal that they are not home.

Read the original:
Satirical Please Rob Me May Point to Business Model for Twitter and Foursquare Users

I’ve learned to take IT consulting firms’ predictions with a grain of salt. Sometimes these firms come up with provocative stuff for the purpose of selling their consulting services and research reports. They may not always have a real understanding of where things are going.

One firm that’s consistently accurate and level-headed, however, is Forrester Research. Forrester has been around for over 25 years and they’re well-respected. That’s why I found their latest blog about the coming of a new computing age of particular interest.

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff uses the recent launch of Apple’s iPad as motivation to discuss the growing problem of incompatibility between the current rash of devices (Android, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, etc.) and web connectivity. “Your site may not work right on these devices,” says Bernoff, “especially if it includes Flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.”

Bernoff says this phenomenon is just part of the problem. In addition to device incompatibility, there seems to be more closed than open systems on the Web, no doubt for competitive reasons. Facebook’s applications, for example, only work on Facebook.

“Web marketing has grown since 1995,” says Bernoff, “based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization – it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized. Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines.”

The result is something Forrester Research labels the “Splinternet.” The firm believes the end of the cross-platform compatibility web era is near.

Forrester offers as proof of the Splinternet’s existence the fact that technology standards once controlled by open standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will now be controlled by platform vendors like Apple and Facebook. On the Internet, advertising and user experience side, they suggest that cookie-based customization is being replaced by profile-based customization, and that standard ad formats will now have to be customized for sites and networks that are acceptable to the new devices.

How interesting – here we thought in our multi-option digital world that we were moving towards enhanced inter-connectivity and compatibility. It turns out the opposite may be true.

But Bernoff cautions Internet marketers not to jump off a cliff just yet. Instead, he says, “choose your devices carefully – investments in one cannot be transferred easily to others if you make a mistake. Rethink analytics, links, and measurement – — they’re just becoming available in the new environments.”

Still, I can see a lot of online marketers getting palpitations and sweaty palms right now.

More:

The announcement of Google’s Nexus One phone combined with the pressure from Droid and other touchscreen technologies may finally have the iPhone worried, if not on the run.

So what could Apple do to quickly show that its iPhone is not going to let anyone see it sweat? There’s a pretty simple answer, if Apple is willing to do it.

Allow third-party applications to run in the background.

Recent ads for the iPhone celebrate the fact that you can continue a phone call while searching the Web for restaurant reservations and buying flowers online. Sure, you can do that – as well as playing iTunes music while doing other activity on your phone.

But if instead of iTunes, you prefer to listen to Pandora, then you’re stuck. You can’t do any other activity on your phone and hear Pandora’s tunes at the same time since Apple restricts third-party applications from running in the background.

Since you can do that on the Android and the Palm Pre, Apple has finally found themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

But Apple’s own development guidelines seem staunchly rooted in keeping the third-party apps out of the background, even if it means inconvenience for its users:

“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. It’s important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.”

The blogging community is pining for this change to be made by Apple – and if a Google phone comes along with more muscle and background apps running, they may bolt.

“Background apps. From Twitter, to IM and VoIP apps (that are simply impractical to use with just PUSH), background apps are a must have,” wrote one blogger on Monday.

Whether this comes with a next generation version of the iPhone will be interesting to see, especially if an iPhone 4.0 is already floating around.

What is an easy step Apple can take to stave off the impending Google phone wave? Allow users to run apps in the background.

More:
Background Apps Can Help iPhone Compete

Back in October of 2008, We Watch Your Website’s security blog reported that malicious hackers were actually using successful SEO campaigns to spread a huge money making bit of malware to unsuspecting victims. The attack was maniacally brilliant. By finding vulnerable sites in the SERPs for the term “Halloween costume”, they infect the legitimate site with malicious code that will silently redirect (redirecting to a different page without changing the Url) a visitor to a site that claims that their computer is infected with a virus that can be quickly and easily removed by purchasing their advertised anti-virus solution. Don’t think this will work? Evidence from Panda Labs shows that the attacks were earning malicious hackers roughly $14 million a month.

SEO Strategies
The foundation of the attack lies in a company’s hard work to earn a decent enough ranking on the SERP for a targeted term. But abusing SEO doesn’t end there. Once the site has been identified and exploited, the attacker actually use keywords that have been optimized for higher search engine rankings in the redirect to help push their infected sites up in the rankings. So by increasing the rankings of their target websites, the attackers are able to create a greater need among their potential customers.
Holiday time attacks
According to Panda Labs, there is also a fluctuation in these types of attacks as the economy makes headlines. With an estimated $168 million a year to be made of this scam, you can bet that there is nothing to suggest this attack to slow down anytime soon. Being the holiday season, attacks are expected to increase as Christmas time is one of the busiest times of the year for malicious hackers. With IT staff taking time to be with family and shoppers more likely to let down their guard as they look for online deals, the holidays are ripe for attacks.

Prevention
As a user, the best way to protect yourself from this type of attack is to ignore warnings that don’t come from your installed security software. If your anti-malware solution isn’t warning you of infection, odds are a website or a pop-up that you have never seen before is there to help you out – no questions asked.
Owners of websites can do their part to protect their customers, and their SEO ranking. A few simple ways to tell if your site has been exploited with this attack are:

• Visitors complain about getting viruses from your site.
• Visitors complain about being redirected from your site.
• Google or Yahoo! have listed your site as a possible harmful site.
• Your traffic dramatically increases or decreases.
• Check the last login logs on your website’s server. If the IP address is unfamiliar, your site may have been exploited.

Of course, visit your site on a regular basis. If you notice a warning about a possible infection when you are viewing your site, you may be the victim of an attack.

Excerpted from:
Website Exploit + SEO = Payday

One thing you can depend on: Innovation in the online world will continue in 2010. Granted, a lot of that may come from such well-known powerhouses as Amazon and Google. But you can also be certain that innovation will spring from lesser known names.

It’s a good idea for online marketers to keep an eye on innovators, because they often represent emerging trends that could become new ways of doing business. Two companies worth watching as we move into next year are Next Jump and Square.

Powered by Next Jump

Next Jump “may well be the most intriguing Internet business that you’ve never heard of,” writes Steve Lohr in The New York Times.  Interestingly, Next Jump is not a new company, it’s just relatively invisible. For years, employee discount programs and frequent buyer rewards programs have used Next Jump’s technology platform. Over half of Fortune 500 companies use it for employee discount programs. But Next Jump just held a coming out party of sorts to announce that it is no longer just a back-end system. In fact, the company recently launched Corporate Perks,  a website that for the first time allows small businesses and consumers to access its marketplace.

What’s so special about Next Jump? Founder Charlie Kim says it’s Next Jump’s “true microtargeting” capabilities. Next Jump gathers a lot of data from companies, customers, and credit card transactions and analyzes the data. Then the company carefully tailors offers to a tiny number of people, sometimes even individuals, sending email alerts or serving up appropriate Web ads. As a result, people see only offers that are most likely to interest them. Apparently, the system works: Next Jump claims for every eleven individuals who see an ad, they generate one sale. This is an unheard of ratio in e-commerce – it’s typically more like 1,000 to 1, not 11 to 1.

Chances are you will start seeing “Powered by Next Jump” on an increasing number of offer-driven sites. Yahoo Deals already displays this on its Personal Offers site. Next Jump just introduced applications for the iPhone, Droid, and BlackBerry phones that point consumers to one of its sites offering deep discounts on merchandise.

Square Transactions

Square is the new venture launched two weeks ago by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The “square” itself is a little plastic device that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone. What it does is pretty intriguing: Square makes it possible for anyone to swipe a credit card and make a payment via a back-end system created by Dorsey and his colleagues. Like PayPal, Square avoids the need for the user to be an authorized merchant, so the system opens up mobile payments to small businesses and consumers alike.

The Square application for the iPhone will soon be duplicated for the Droid and eventually for Blackberry. The implications are enormous – virtually any business can instantly become a merchant and accept payments. It could even facilitate simple consumer-to-consumer transactions, such as someone buying an item from a seller via a Craigslist ad. Square is creating a lot of buzz right now, and investors are reportedly lining up to fund the start-up.

Competitors are taking Square seriously. VeriFone, the leader in credit card payments, only days ago rushed out its “PAYware Mobile” application for the iPhone that includes a PAYware Mobile reader. Jack Dorsey was asked by blogger Michael Arrington of TechCrunch about the VeriFone application, and this is what he had to say:

Jack Dorsey on VeriFone

Keep a close eye on Next Jump and Square in 2010. These are the kinds of innovative companies that will help drive online marketing to new heights.

More:
Two Companies to Watch in 2010

A few short years ago, who could have imagined how precarious business conditions would be for traditional newspapers and magazines. As 2009 comes to a close, it marks the end of another dismal year for print media. Symbolic of the plight of magazines was the October 5 announced shutdown of the 70-year old Gourmet by embattled publisher Condé Nast.

While a rebirth of print magazines is unlikely, these publications are still fighting for their collective lives. But now the battle is being waged largely on the Internet. Magazine publishing companies that compete with one another “are discussing the creation of an ad network that would sell targeted space across many of the industry’s websites,” says an October 6 Ad Age article. One magazine executive told Ad Age: “We’re getting killed by ad networks. …if we could just create some scale on our own and sell across it, we can get a lot better ad rates.”

Clearly, desperate times require desperate measures. While the industry has discussed such a possibility before, it seems to be a more compelling need today. “Now there are maybe 500 ad networks,” another magazine executive told Ad Age. “Last time the conversation started, there were maybe only 200 ad networks.”

Variations of a magazine ad network already exist. Time, for example, has a network for its own print and online properties. Other magazine publishers have created topic-specific networks, such as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s “Martha’s Circle,” according to Ad Age.

A home-grown magazine-controlled ad network is just one strategy for survival. Another may be publishing electronic versions of newspapers and magazines. True, some already exist, but not in any formalized paid form. So it’s interesting to hear the latest rumor, previously reported by Ad Age, that a group of magazine executives supposedly held talks with Apple about digital editions of magazines to be sold via iTunes. Apple is also said to be in talks with The New York Times about producing a digital edition, says Wired.The discussions center around Apple’s new “tablet,” a product yet to be officially announced, that could provide a platform for reading digital magazines.

The Apple tablet in itself is significant new – it could very well catapult Apple into a brand new arena, competing directly with Amazon’s e-book device, Kindle.

But the real message behind Apple’s tablet, Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s eReader, and similar devices is their ultimate purpose: to replace traditional print versions of newspapers, magazines, and books with electronic versions. And the message behind a potential online ad network created by magazines is pretty clear: We’re raising the white flag on print and surrendering to the digital world.

Read more from the original source:

You may think that down in South Africa we’ve been insulated from the effects of the global recession, but affiliate marketers around the world are reeling from the effects of the recession too.

In the last 3 months we’ve seen a significantly increased number of US and global affiliate programs either going out of business or intermittently being suspended by their networks due to funds shortages.

Advertisers, in a recession you need to prove that you’re a stable revenue partner.  I’ve jotted down a few guidelines that are tried and tested and are especially useful to merchants trading in troubled times.

1. Never run out of funds or have a network suspend your program.
   Affiliates will abandon you for the next brand.
2. Pay on time, every time.
   Everybody is sensitive about payment – especially the affiliates that are bankrolling your marketing.
   If you keep them waiting for payment they’ll simply cut back or stop marketing your program.
3. Talk to your affiliates.
   I’m not talking about the usual formulaic letters and auto-emails.  REALLY talk to your affiliates – find out what they need, how they think you can improve your program and what you should be focusing on.
4. Work your offer.
   Improve payouts, introduce free trials, try continuity billing  & implement additional payment methods & deferred payment options like BillMeLater.
   Offer your affiliates lead payouts on long sales cycle products and compensate them for  recurring purchases
5. Do private / one off / out-of-the-box marketing and promotions deals.
   Now’s not the time to be stressing about keeping things simple!   You need to do more so think about tracking offline sales, referring url tracked sales, set up dedicated  tracked landing pages and offer co-branded pages.
6. Spy on your competitors.
   You need to be leading the pack on creative, affiliate and consumer offers, coupons, offline marketing – now’s the time to take the lead!
7. Aggressively manage your EPC.
   Affiliates really DO watch network EPC’s and use it as a determining factor when selecting programs.
8. Take on your competitors.
   Every competitor has a weak spot.  Find it and exploit it to your advantage.  Did your competitor’s tracking break?  Were they suspended?  Did their EPC drop though the floor?  Did a coupon lapse?  You need to know in order to take advantage of guerrilla marketing opportunities.
9. Make good on failures.
   Don’t just brush untracked channel sales under the carpet – check your referrers, check IP’s, cross reference coupons and make sure you attribute every sale you can to your affiliates.  If your tracking breaks don’t wait for it to be reported on a forum.  Proactively compensate your affiliates and make good!
10. Expand, expand, expand.
    Affiliates have a choice of over 160 affiliate and CPA networks.  Pick wisely and be where your affiliate is.

Have anything to add to this list?  Feel free to comment!

Excerpt from:
Recession proofing your affiliate business

Anytime a conversation turns to content promotion via social media marketing, Digg is sure to be mentioned within the first few seconds. This is hardly surprising since Digg is the most popular of the social media bookmarking sites. Used properly, Digg can generate a ton of traffic to a website (enough to test even the strongest of servers if the content goes “hot”).

But a well-rounded social media marketing campaign is about more than just Digg. Of course, there are the usual suspects. Reddit comes to mind. But you should also take advantage of the many other niche bookmarking sites that have sprung up. While these niche sites won’t get you the volume of traffic that can be had from going hot on Digg, they are helpful for a few reasons.

Niche social media sites help you:

•     Get Higher Quality Traffic- Sure, going hot on Digg could get you about 20,000 visitors to your page, but the quality of the traffic leaves something to be desired. The quality of traffic from niche social media sites is usually higher than from a mainstream one. In fact, Tamar Weinberg did an interesting case study to find which generates better traffic: niche or generic social media sites. According to Weinberg the trend indicates that niche traffic is better.
•     Build Your Authority in Your Industry- I’ve also found doing well on niche social media sites helps you build your authority. Think about it: if your peers in your industry are voting for your content, it’s a solid endorsement of your level of knowledge and skill. You can use this new found respect to position yourself as an industry leader, thus improving the bottom line of your business.
•     Generate Relevant Inbound Links- While I don’t believe link relevancy plays a significant role in search engine placement, I do believe it affects the quality of the traffic coming from the inbound link. For example, let’s say two websites linked to this article: one of them is a website that sells lamps and another is an internet marketing blog. Which link would send visitors that are likelier to be truly interested in this article? The internet marketing blog of course. Niche social media sites tend to generate relevant back links that send quality traffic.

Other reasons to use niche social media sites:

•     Niche Social Media Users are more Supportive- If you’ve spent any time at all on Digg, you know how unforgiving the community can be. No matter how great your content is, there will always be trolls trying to stir up trouble. It’s not a big deal, but if you’re thin-skinned, it could get to you. I’ve noticed niche social media sites often have supportive communities that are there to help each other. As someone involved in Internet marketing, I tend to use Sphinn regularly. The community there is much more positive than on big sites like Digg, and I’ve learned quite a bit from the users there. It’s a healthy environment for interaction.
•     Your Success Rate Will Likely be Higher- Unless you’re a power Digg user, you’ll probably have a tough time getting your content to go hot on a regular basis. However, it’s typically easier to get your content to the front page on a niche site. Again, it won’t generate the volume of traffic Digg will, but if you can go hot on a few niche sites, you’ll get a fair amount of attention on a consistently.
•     All of Your Eggs Won’t be in One Basket- One of the best reasons to go deeper than Digg is the simple law of diversification. If you pin all of your hopes on one social media site, you’re sure to end up disappointed. By diversifying your social media marketing efforts, you improve your chances of having success. Of course, make sure you don’t spread yourself so thin that you can’t devote enough time to being a strong member of the community.

So, are you ready to further your efforts beyond Digg? Here’s a great list of 50 niche social media sites to get you started.

View post:
Looking Beyond Digg for Social Media Marketing

Imagine a site where you could define a project, application, or task you wanted to have completed and a global workforce of talent would bid on doing the project on an hourly or fixed cost basis.  You then get to review their qualifications, interview them, and see what other’s have said about the projects they have done for them.  You select your contractor to complete the project, and while they are working on your task you get screen shots of their computer screen as they go, so you know they are on task.

I have been telling a lot of people about this site.  oDesk has opened up a world of possibilities for me.  Here is are some examples of some tasks I had completed:

1. Identify all the flights available from British Airways can put them in a specified html format for tripzam.com.  For $2.22 per hour, my contractor in the Philippines completed the task in short order. See the final results of the british airways destinations.

2. Create a php script that shows my friends for afftwitlist.com so that I could show what people who are on the affiliate twitter list are saying on the site. Cost, $54 fixed price.

If you can define the task, you can find someone at oDesk to complete it for you.  oDesk charges your credit card and handles paying the workers.  They also have some more advanced features for bug reports, and code checkin, if you are running a more sophisticated programming outfit.

Like 99Designs.com for logo design, oDesk has been an eye opener!  Check it out!

Originally posted here:
Your Global Workforce!

Fraud definitely is on the minds of online merchants this season. In fact, a survey sponsored by the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) conducted by the 41st Parameter Inc., revealed that 84% of the respondents believed that there will be a slight or substantial increase in online fraudulent activity this holiday season.

When asked about some of the largest challenges in fighting this type of fraud, two-thirds of the respondents stated that the increase in fraud ring activity and botnets (computers used to commit eFraud) are of utmost concern. Further, a full 30% of the respondents stated that a lack of money for the technology to fight online fraud is another formidable challenge.

With respect to these figures, Ori Eisen, the Chief Innovation Officer at 41st Parameter had the following to say:

“As the Global economy continues to slow down, organizations are slashing budgets across the board, including vital IT needs designed to help protect the bottom-line. What’s particularly alarming about this counter-intuitive strategy is roughly one-third of e-commerce fraud investigators surveyed said their number one challenge is not receiving adequate funding to procure proper fraud prevention technology, thereby leaving their online channel a key target for cybercrime.”

Quite an interesting statement indeed.

What Can You Do to Avoid or Prevent Fraud Altogether?
There are a number of tangible steps that a business can take to reduce the incidence of fraud. Here a few ideas for you:

1. Display the fact that you have a strong “anti-fraud” policy on your website as this warning alone may deter potential fraud incidents.
2. Ensure that providing a credit card verification code is mandatory on your website.
3. Carefully scrutinize any emails from Hotmail, Yahoo, and other free email accounts as fraud perpetrators prefer to use these types of anonymous emails.
4. Scrutinize any orders with a different “bill to” and “ship to” addresses. While these addresses may differ if consumers are sending a gift or are dropshipping an item, in many cases, it can be a sign of fraudulent activity.
5. Be vigilent when it comes to overseas orders.
6. Take advantage of technology and use an account verification system (AVS). This type of technology works to ensure that the zip codes or the postal codes of credit cards match the billing addresses.
7. On very large and/or questionable orders, call the customer and/or the credit card company to verify the information.
8. Employ the services of a company that specializes in fraud prevention.

With these steps you are now well on your way to keeping your business from falling victim to the rising tide of online fraud

Read the original post:
Is Online Credit Card Fraud on the Rise?

Ian Rosenwach, product manager at LinkShare, announced here at ReveNews.com in October this year the launch of the new LinkShare web service called “LinkShare Targeted Merchandiser API” and the feature by LinkShare that is based on that new web service called “Easy Links”.

This is only an addition to a set of different web services that are available to LinkShare publishers. The web service was silently launched months earlier already and this post was originally written, but not published in June, a few days before the soft launch of the service. I provided feedback back in June. I updated and expanded this post to incorporate changes and additions to the new features since I originally wrote it some five months ago.

This API is LinkShare first step into the realm of contextual advertising. The web service returns 1-X products of a LinkShare Advertiser, based on the content of a web page that was either specified in the API call or the referring page /URL (default), if no link was provided.

This is not a full blown contextual advertising service like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Amazon Omakase Links or eBay AdContext. LinkShare does not render any ads for you. You or somebody else (hint) needs to do this for you. Maybe LinkShare will offer something like this in the future, but nothing is planned to my knowledge.

The implementation guide lines for this API for developers can be found here.

A Look under the Hood

Let’s take a look under the hood. I had already a bunch of question after looking over the beta of their Implementation Guidelines. LinkShare did not get back to me yet regarding all the questions and comments that I had, so I decided to repeat them here in my post.

Using the vast number of products that are already available to LinkShare via their Merchandiser Service (Affiliate Product Data Feeds) is a good thing to do and something that I am talking about with people for a long time already. Making access to the product information as easy as possible for non-technical folks should be high on the priority list of advertisers. Existing and potentially new affiliates often like to promote a particular product they like and recommend. Being able to pull a product ad with affiliate link to get a commission for referrals is not as easy as adding an iLike widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. It should be, but we are still a far cry away from this.

Access to the new API is cumbersome and not helping a lot with the mentioned goal to make it very easy to use. Advertisers decide for themselves, if they want to make their products available through the API or not. The advertiser must be using the LinkShare Merchandiser Service already though. Merchandiser enabled advertisers are not automatically enabled for Easy Links. You can find a list of Easy Links supporting merchants at the LinkShare Help Center here.

The affiliate itself also has to be enabled for the API and as far as I understand does this also require to be already enabled for the Merchandiser Service. The Merchandiser is not free to get access to for many affiliates. You either have to pay a setup fee or must be a good performing affiliate within the LinkShare network for several months already. But even if the Advertiser has the API enabled and uses the Merchandiser and you are an affiliate of that merchant and have merchandiser enabled for your account, does not give you automatically access to the API. The merchant has to manually approve every affiliate first. I don’t know if advertisers can enable automatic approval or not, at least for affiliates who were already approved to receive the advertisers product data feed via FTP.

Once you are approved for the API itself and for the access to the advertiser’s products via the API, you can start making API calls and use the new web services feature. Unfortunately is it necessary to specify with the API call which advertiser’s products should be used for the contextual matching. It does not work in the way that the more advertisers are enabled for the API for your account the more products will become available for the matching of your content. This is a huge drawback and something LinkShare will hopefully change soon.

The affiliate has to specify an advertiser’s MID with the API call and then only 1-x of the products available for that single merchant will be returned. This means that the affiliate has to pre-qualify the content of every page where you want to make use of the API first. If the page is about listening to music and not about making music, you should specify the MID of Apple iTunes and not Musicnotes.com to get a good match for example. This determination is a large piece of the matching already. If you need the API make some work for you, then I guess that you have to use advertisers like Overstock.com, Wal-Mart or Target.com who have a lot of different products.

I noted back in June in my feedback to LinkShare about the new web service, that the practical use for the API will be significantly limited because of the requirement to provide the MID of an advertiser for the contextual matching. Ads cannot be generated like an AdSense, YPN, Amazon’s Omakase, eBay AdContext or Microsoft Content Ad.

The “MID” is not something that a publisher specifies today on a page and ad unit level. He cannot reuse existing meta-data (keywords meta-tags etc.) and has only very few (and always ugly) ways of doing it. If you cannot find or program yourself a work around, the only option you are left with to limit the content of your whole website or website section to make sure that it always matched the product catalog of a specific merchant and then hard code the MID in your site template. I strongly suggest to make the MID optional and do a contextual matching across all merchants that are enabled for the publisher.

The updated developers guide also did not provide an answer to what results you have to expect in certain instances. I hope that the following question will be answered by the LinkShare web services team soon.

If I specify that I want 10 products back as a result, but you cannot find 10 products that actually match the content, what do you do? Do you return less than the 10 (only the ones where you have some kind of match)? Or are you filling the missing slots with products that you pick based on other criteria? What happens if there are no matches at all? I didn’t see an error message for that, which implies that you always return at least one product.

Web Interface and Widgets

In addition to the access to the Easy Links feature via web services, for the tech-savvy affiliates, LinkShare also offers access to the Easy-Links feature via an easy to use web interface. If you know how to create and implement Google AdSense ads into your website, you won’t have any issues with using the Easy Links widgets provided via the LinkShare web interface for publishers.

The Ad units provided by LinkShare are pre-defined, and are available in the standard banner sizes: 300×250 (medium rectangle), 468×60 (full banner), 234×60 (half banner), 120×240 (vertical banner), 125×125 (square button), 728×90 (leader board), 160×600 (wide skyscraper) and 120×600 (skyscraper).

The units can be customized to some degree. You can specify the border color, text color and link color and if you want to show the product name and/or product price. You do not have control over the product image and if or if not you want to show it. It also comes with a “buy now” button image, which cannot be changed. Also the link at the end of each product with the anchor “at Merchant Name” is static and not customizable.

Also not customizable are the background color of the ad unit, the font face, the font styles (bold, italic, size) and an alternative style for links if they are hovered over by the visitor. The border around the Ad unit cannot be suppressed, if you want to. You can only change the color to match your sites background as good as possible, especially if the background is not simply one color, but an image or gradient etc.

However, it’s a good start and most affiliates are probably able to live with the limitations. I also assume that the team at LinkShare will extend on the available options in the future.

The ads will not show the most relevant products right away. It may take up to 48 hours until LinkShare determined the most relevant products for your particular pages. LinkShare will show products that match the site category that you selected during registration for your web site until LinkShare completed the contextual matching process.

The Code to add to your affiliate pages looks like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
lsadunit_publisherId = 'YOURPUBLISHERID';
lsadunit_oid = '102327';
lsadunit_width = 160;
lsadunit_height = 600;
lsadunit_uid = '2004804';
lsadunit_u1 = '';
</script>
<script src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js"
 mce_src="http://adnetwork.linksynergy.com/lsadunit.js"
 type="text/javascript">
</script>

You can get additional help and information to this feature at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers here.

Personal Comments

LinkShare also seems to be pretty confident that they are able to do a perfect job when it comes to the matching of products to the publisher’s page content. Even Google who has a much bigger pool of ads to chose from and several years for improving their matching algorithms (which still fails to produce good results in many cases), provides some means for the publisher to help them with the matching.

I am almost certain that LinkShare’s matching is by far not as good as Google’s nor do they have remotely enough ads to pick from for the matching, which makes it not always easier to find an ad that is actually relevant and targeted.

I suggested to LinkShare that the publisher will be provided with some overwrite options, e.g. a set of keywords that should be used. At the very least as a failover, if LinkShare’s content matching returns too few results or no results at all.

In addition to that they could use the proprietary HTML tags by Google or by Yahoo! for the specification, which (content) segments of a HTML document should be included for the content matching (the Google tag) and/or which segments should be excluded from the matching (the Yahoo! tag).

I am pleased to see that a few of my suggestions and comments that I made to LinkShare directly were actually listed to and changed, such as the inclusion of the Error Numbers in the developer guide.

Conclusion

Overall I have to say that I think that it was a move into the right direction by LinkShare, but that I am not impressed by the implementation of the API as it is now. Some might argue that you are better of using the existing Merchandiser Query Tool API, which is not very far-fetched, but they just started.

The least I want to do is discourage the folks over at LinkShare and stop with what they are doing right now. Consider this assessment as a well intentioned feedback. Let’s keep the stuff coming!

To learn more about the LinkShare web services and data feeds as well as web services and data feeds provided by other affiliate networks, check out the collection of resources and guides over here.

* Note to LinkShare Merchandiser Access
Request for access to Merchandiser Feeds – Online Form at LinkShare.com

Quote from their website:

• You have been active in the Network for at least 3 months, AND
• You have generated at least 50 orders in the most recent calendar month

LinkShare reserves the right to charge a one-time maintenance fee of $250 or discontinue access to the Merchandiser product.

Additional Information and Resources to Easy Links

• Easy Links Product Info for Publisher (PDF)
• Easy Links Feature Help at the LinkShare Help Center for Publishers
• Implementation Guide Line for Developers
• List of Easy Links enabled Advertisers
• You can also watch the recording of an educational screen cast from LinkShare about Easy Links here. You can also find additional recordings of seminars for Publishers at the LinkShare.com website here

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski

View original post here:

As promised in Part 1 of this 2 part series I’m back with 3 more strategies and easy-to-implement tactics.  One strategy I mentioned that generated some email was providing feedback loops to affiliates.  Too radical for some apparently but let’s clarify a bit.  You do take hands off the wheel a bit but in a balanced manner.

According to Paul Moss, formerly of Insurance.com and now of lead generation group Trouve Media…

“Before doing anything you have to give everyone feedback loops… letting them know what traffic is doing well, what traffic is performing poorly. Give them as much feedback as you can, either through pixel tracking or marketing source code tracking.”

He continues, “Allowing all of those opportunities… to tie it back into their Google spend or their Yahoo spend… and then once you give them all of the transparency to the data, you have to price them according to their own performance.”

Moss says you still need to hold all affiliates accountable to their own performance but, “you continually tell them what traffic is performing well and driving up their marketing allowable… tell them what traffic is performing poorly and driving down their marketing allowable… and hopefully… they adjust the mix. They’re always going to adjust the mix according to volume.”

In the end he says, “The key point is the sharing data as far down the funnel as you feel comfortable with. ”

Let’s jump back in with one of the most controversial topics of all time — how to work collaboratively (not competitively or with “co-opitition” in mind) with affiliates in search marketing.

Develop and communicate a clear, well-reasoned search marketing policy to affiliates.

1. Audit your affiliate program for confluence with paid (PPC) search advertising efforts.

2. Understand value driven by affiliates across various categories based on audit results that demonstrate “triggers” of sales transactions.

3. Create business rules that negate and approve affiliate commissions based on logical rules that are shared openly and pro-actively with affiliates.

4. Understand where your search engine optimization “sweet spot” is by identifying where you want to spend time, energy (money).  Assign “long tail” search terms/keywords (those able to generate less referral volume) to affiliates for their monetization efforts.

Says Moss, “Search engines have algorithm on what they feel is going to provide value to the search engine user and they rank those sites accordingly. From my perspective of having a product. I know that I can sell it best but I’ve got only X amount of core competencies. I want my affiliates to capitalize on areas that aren’t my core competencies or create more depth.”

Indeed, wider affiliate distribution — something I’ll be talking about more with a panel of experts at eComxpo in January 2009 and at SES Chicago coming up in December with the likes of experienced experts, Jeff Ferguson of Napster and Kris Jones of Pepperjam Network (more like empire lately!).  I hope to see you there.

Experiment with social media & content-focused affiliates.

1. Scale your most precious resource, Time: Use new tools, such as Syntryx, to rapidly prospect for qualified affiliates.

2. Provide affiliates with access to helpful, innovative Web 2.0 linking technologies like Linkshare’s FlexLinks or Amazon’s various tools ranging from “SiteStripe” to Widgets.

3. Give affiliates access to product data, coupons and other content via flexible, RSS (real simple syndication)-enabled technologies.

“We’re offering merchants the ability to maintain ‘on sale’ and ‘deal of the day’ RSS campaigns for affiliates to publish on their sites,” says AvantLink’s Gary Marcoccia. “And to take it one step further the affiliates can promote ‘subscriptions’ to the same RSS feeds.”

“The key in generating feed subscribers from their site (in addition to, of course, sales), is affiliate IDs being embedded in links from the deal feeds… for as long as they are in use,” adds Marcoccia.

Consider creative, new approaches to paying and bonusing affiliates based on performance.

1. Throttle up payouts among performers who drive volume at a reasonable cost considering channel confluence issues, etc.

2. Throttle down payouts among under-performers who’ve been given a fair chance but are not performing on a quarterly basis.

“Proactively give fee increases where it’s merited, and decreases where it’s not merited,” says a very level-headded Moss.

“But, make sure that before you give a fee increase that you have enough data to ensure that you have the best chance to be a sustainable price point… if not giving it a little bit of room to grow. Otherwise, people don’t respond well to fee decreases and that’s when they’re going to start shopping their traffic.”

“The loyalty response that you’re going to get from proactively raising somebody’s fee will create a loyalty that you won’t get anywhere else. Combine that with creating a genuine friendship and genuinely getting to know the people, genuinely caring about them, understanding their business.”

Stay tuned for more actionable tips and interviews with experts in a variety of performance-focused Web marketing strategies.  As always I welcome your feedback!

—-

Jeff Molander is a leading Web marketing expert, author and speaker.  He is CEO of Molander & Associates Inc., and can be reached at jeff_at_jeffmolander.com.

Credit:
5 Easy to Implement Affiliate Marketing Tips for Marketers: Part II

Tired of the same old tips-and-tricks about Web affiliate marketing programs?  “Communicate with them, treat them with respect” yada-yada.  What about what really works?  I pulled together a group of my most experienced, thought-leading colleagues to find out what’s moving the needle in affiliate marketing today.  The below innovations are what I discovered.  I’m happy to share these best practices.  Yes, they can be quickly and easily applied – helping you manage your affiliates and extract maximum sales efficiency.

Stay tuned to Revenews for candid interviews with these experts where they’ll “go deep” on their secrets to success.

Allow affiliates to access a knowledge-driven feedback loop to improve their ROI and, as a result, increase yours.

1. Let affiliates “connect the ROI dots” between their investments (media spending) and your ultimate success (sales or new customers).

2. Provide select, trusted affiliates with limited yet unfettered access to your internal metrics and customer behavior data.

Strengthen relationships with superstar affiliates and open doors for potential superstars by actively, yet cautiously, investing hard and soft dollars in them.

1. Invest in affiliates: Underwrite affordable, educational opportunities and conferences for them.  Sponsoring affiliates is very popular in the European realm.

2. Sponsor low-cost, virtual innovation forums and Webinars that offer training opportunities for top affiliates.

3. Provide limited access to Web metrics (ie. Google Analytics, Omniture) and optimization tools that are already at your disposal yet possess a high perceived (and applied!) value among affiliates.

4. Invest in affiliates: Subsidize the media buying of select, high-value affiliates by providing matching contributions to their expenditures or allowing access to your media buying prowess.

If you were paying attention that’s TWO strategies with supporting tactics.  That’s plenty to chew on and begin to take ACTION on.  I’ll be back in a few days with the final three.  Also, stay tuned for more actionable tips and interviews with experts in a variety of performance-focused Web marketing strategies.  I’ll be publishing interviews in the next few weeks.

—-

Jeff Molander is a leading Web marketing expert, author and speaker.  He is CEO of Molander & Associates Inc., and can be reached at jeff_at_jeffmolander.com.

Read the original post:
5 Easy to Implement Affiliate Marketing Tips for Marketers

OK–as a recent Boulder transplant, now here 3 months by way of Seattle, Washington, it has come to my attention that there are not just a couple of start ups scattered around, here and there, willy-nilly– there are in fact start ups a plenty here in Boulder, Colorado!

When I worked at Microsoft, we were always getting tipped into new up and comers around the Seattle area and I thought in my gray Seattle haze that Seattle was the Tech Mecca, oh, but after living here in Boulder I find I was indeed wrong in that assumption!

I have bumped into many techies in the local coffee houses and as well have discovered other networking opportunities by way of TechCocktail.com and the very well renowned Boulder start up kings TechStars – who with their 10,000 sq foot office (The Bunker) on Pearl street in the heart of Boulder help new technology start ups get funded, get off the ground, and learn from the best mentors in the industry! The impressive list of mentors at TechStars includes team members from Foundry Group a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in early stage information technology companies, which also happens to be located in Boulder. TechStars was founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis in 2006. In the Tech Stars mentor spotlight they have tech giants such as: Matt Mullenweg Founder, Automattic (Wordpress.com, Akismet), Jeff Clavier Founder, SoftTech VC, and Eric Marcoullier Founder, MyBlogLog. TechStars takes only ten companies each summer. If you have an amazing web-based or software idea, applications for the next round open on January 20th. Details here.

A few of my favorite tech start ups and tech companies I know of, or have run into here in Boulder/ Denver area include the following:

Brightkite – Location-based social networking (Folks ya gotta see this!) See where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time.
Eventvue – The best conferences include great networking. EventVue helps your attendee’s network and find their next business partner, customer, or employee at your conference.
Filtrbox.com – Filtrbox is the media monitoring service of choice for savvy professionals.
foodzie.com – an online marketplace where consumers can buy food directly from small artisan producers.
GNIP (guh – nip)– in fact one block away from me, is this up and coming start up that will have you all banging on their doors – they make data portability suck less.
ignighter.com – Incredible idea! Group dating, safer, less awkward and more fun!
Lijit.com – Lijit allows you to easily create your own search engine. One that searches your blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll, and more. By offering the Lijit Search Wijit on your blog.
Rally Software – From small pilot projects to distributed, multi-team programs, Rally’s family of Agile lifecycle management solutions give teams the visibility and collaboration needed to formalize and scale agile development practices that deliver high-value software in rapid iterations.
Socialthing.com – Socialthing was acquired by AOL in August, 2008.! Congrats! – Socialthing! Makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.
SurveyGizmo – SurveyGizmo is a creative platform for your marketing, lead generation and research projects. Create surveys, landing pages, polls, quizzes, contact forms, ticketing queues and mobile marketing campaigns.
Syntryx.com – Often called “a deal flow engine,” Syntryx provides powerful research tools, internet asset valuations and publisher acquisition solutions for every major online market. Syntryx.com is the advanced competitive analysis tool extraordinaire.

“The Western frontier is open, and geeks are populating the range.” A quip from Ben Casnocha in his latest article “Start-Up Town” posted on Sept 10th on the Amercian.com. “Start – Up Town” is an infectiously exorbitant article written for The American with the candor and splendor of amazing author Ben Casnocha . Ben also authored the bestselling business book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley, which the New York Times called “precocious, informative, and entertaining. This amazing article highlighted my suspicions that I am not alone here (as far as geeks go) and tackles the fair rundown of the last 15 years of how Boulder managed to accomplish its place as a leading tech start up town.

A few great resources for technology companies in Colorado are as follows:

CSIA Colorados Technology Association

Next Event for CSIA – COLORADO SOFTWARE AND TECHNOLOGY SHOW – DEMOGala 2008, October 2nd The event runs all day long. More than 100 speakers from 100+ companies.

http://csiaonline.com/Events/DEMOgala/tabid/192/Default.aspx

Colorado Start Ups

W3W3 – Colorado’s Voice of the Technology Community

Blog Post Written by: Heather Paulson, President of www.PaulsonManagementGroup.com

Boulder Colorado Tech Startups Spotlight

Subtitle: About Data Feeds, Web Services and the use of Interfaces (APIs) in Affiliate Marketing.

Slow progress is made when it comes to the utilization of data feeds and web services by affiliate networks and also by advertisers. The biggest progress is currently made when it comes to web services, which is a good thing.

The use for data feeds and web services by affiliate publishers might be similar to some degree, but there are distinct cases where they differ significantly. Web services cannot replace data feeds entirely, but they can and should replace some of the uses of data feeds today, where web services do a much better job and where data feeds were a poor (but in the past the only) choice to begin with.

Third party providers who aggregate and normalize data feeds will also not be replaced by web services and cannot be replaced by offerings from the individual networks either.

Each and everything has its own distinct role and purpose, its core strengths and its own weaknesses. The goal should not be to replace one or the other, but to leverage and support the strengths and reduce or eliminate the weaknesses.

Advertisers, networks, 3rd party feeds and widget providers and affiliate publishers all need to play their part and the right use and availability of data feeds and web services as interface between the four parties will ensure that everybody gets the most out of it and be winning at the end.

Theory
In theory is only the connection between advertisers and affiliate publishers relevant and networks and 3rd party providers are “only” a middleman that should be eliminated. However this is not the case in reality. Those middle men are needed and have to play a distinct role in many scenarios where a one-on-one communication between advertiser and publisher is impractical or impossible. The only option in those cases would be that the publisher develops himself the interface that is already provided by the networks and 3rd party providers. This is of course possible, but in many cases a waste of resources on the publishers side and a distraction from the publishers own core competencies.

Reality
If you want to use a computer, you don’t have to buy an operating system or software for it. You could write those things yourself and would keep the software companies out of the loop. Except for a few very specific applications is this scenario completely unrealistic and may sound like a funny joke to some. However, this is exactly what we are talking about, if you are talking about the elimination of the network or 3rd party middleman.

I created some diagrams to show the flow of data (information) from a merchant and advertiser to the affiliate publisher. I included more than just product data, because those are not the only information that an affiliate needs to get from an advertiser in order to make this all work. Some of the other information are often overlooked unfortunately, although they are at least as equally important as the product data and should be made accessible via feeds and/or web services too.

1. One publisher/affiliate has one relationship to a single advertiser/merchant only.

2. One publisher has multiple relationships with different advertisers and merchants that each provides product data, URLs, creative’s directly to the affiliate in the same or different formats and methods.

3. A network aggregates all the data from multiple advertisers and provides the data in one format and one method to the individual publisher.

4. The publisher has relationships with multiple advertisers via multiple networks. The networks aggregate for him the data from the group of merchants each network has a relationship with. The publisher has now the problem again that the different networks provide the data in different formats and via different methods to him.

5. 3rd party service and tool providers aggregate the data across multiple networks and/or multiple advertisers and provides them in one normalized format to the publisher via only delivery method.

Here is a link to download the full Diagram

The Roles
What you can see from the diagrams is the fact that networks and 3rd party vendors are playing the role of aggregators and data cleansers who provide data from multiple sources and possibly different format and delivery method to the receiver (the publisher or the 3rd party provider) in one normalized format.

Networks aggregate and normalize the data of multiple advertisers and 3rd party providers do the same but a level higher, across multiple networks.

The goal and result at the end is a one-on-one relationship with a publisher to make it as simple as possible to use the data to promote the advertisers products and services. That is what the affiliate’s core competence should be; reality is that affiliates are spending way too much time and energy on the aggregation and normalization of data from various different sources, in different formats and delivery methods.

Poor Job Done
The affiliate networks did in the past a very poor job when it came to the aggregation and delivery of normalized data to publishers who needed it. There are no standards, little or no documentation and limited to no access to the data by automated means at all. Even the networks own definitions and specifications were and are often too vague and sometimes even violated by themselves, due to the lack of validation of the data that the network received from the advertiser, often due to the lack or too vague specifications of the feed structure and delivery methods.

The use of standards in web services technology, like SOAP or REST help to reduce this kind of issues at least for the web service option that is still in its infancy and evolving.

The 3rd party aggregators took over and dealt (and still deal) with all that kind of issues for the publishers and provide data to affiliates in clear format or for direct use via widgets and gadgets.

Since networks are in many cases the one-on-one connection point for some affiliates, tools and services that are usually provided by the 3rd party services are and should be provided by the networks directly to the publishers.

Perfect World Scenario
In a perfect world (which should be everybody’s goal that you want to reach eventually, without never getting there, even if you think that you almost made it) things would be like this.

To make it easy for merchants (who provide the original data) and for 3rd party aggregators to get data through the network efficiently, standards should be defined and used by all players to avoid vague and incomplete proprietary structures, formats and methods, or simply said: Stop reinventing the wheel over and over again (and that more or less poorly to top it all of)!

This is another good reason for having an industry association (which we do not have today); the discussion, specification, agreement and documentation of standards like that.

3rd party vendors should concentrate on the means of delivery to the publisher and provide the highest flexibility and number of delivery methods as possible. Listen to affiliates suggestions and requests and then implement those.

Affiliate network could partner with 3rd party vendors to make the same tools and delivery options available to the publishers directly for the kind of publishers who decide to only work with one particular network directly. This would allow networks to concentrate on their core competencies, like the aggregation and normalization of advertiser data, affiliate tracking and fraud detection and supplemental services like commission payments to the affiliates on behalf of the advertiser and/or affiliate management and recruiting services.

Make access to the data available without the need to jump through several hoops. Show what you have and provide documentation and clear instructions, without the need for asking for this information. Agree on standards wherever possible to make everybody’s day easier and to free up time that you could spent on improving your core competencies.

Conclusion
All this is in no conflict with the ideas of a free market and strong completion. The global market is not localized and proprietary and so you shouldn’t be either.

I have a lot of ideas for tools and widgets that would be of great help for publishers and even help to expand your current perspective of who a publisher could be today. The problem is that those ideas (where I am probably not the only one who thinks of the same) all require that the data and information flow is efficient and streamlined that we need to spend less time on reoccurring/repetitive problems and implementing workarounds for shortcomings that shouldn’t exist and more time on implementing those ideas and have publisher do what their core competency is, being innovative in the ways they promote the advertisers products and services and reach into markets where the advertiser cannot or does not want to go or not even know that it existed at all.

To the Future!

For resources and information about the mess we are having today, see my affiliate data feeds and web services resources at Cumbrowski.com. They help, but do not solve the core problems that we have.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski @ Cumbrowski.com
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur

Here is the original post:
Data and Information Flow Hurdles in Affiliate Marketing